So I posted earlier about my Power Hour program written in Java. As I continued learning about the Android development platform, I came to the point where I had to get my hands dirty and work through an application start-to-finish to really solidify the concepts. I chose to rewrite my Power Hour application for Android. Before I’m labeled a lush, there were practical reasons for this:
- I’ve written it before, so I know the functionality and design issues; therefore the learning curve resides in the platform, not the program.
- It would require several interacting Activities to achieve satisfactory functionality.
- It would require use of a background Service for music playback.
- It would require querying of the phone’s internal or external storage, providing practice using Content Providers.
- The ListActivity used for building a music play list required a custom ListAdapter to make toggle-able list items
- Saving/Loading play lists would have to run in a separate thread as to not lock up the UI, so threading issues were explored.
- Interrupting a constantly-updating application required reliable and robust state preservation.
I think it was a really good exercise to learn my way around the Android platform. I don’t currently have an Android device to test on (I’m holding out for the HTC Evo for Sprint), but testing on the emulator has been very successful. I obviously won’t release anything that hasn’t been extensively tested on real devices, but until I can do that I am very satisfied with how much I’ve learned about developing for Android.
(Images are obviously placeholders until I decide what I want to display on the app)
