Database Users

New to Android

Hello all so Im new to android I came over from BB I got sick of the worthless OS they keep updating. Im trying to get up to speed everything with android. I got root last night using the unevoked's new process. As Im reading different threads I keep hearing people refer to adb shell. What is this? I also have a PC and a MAC but I'm more of a Mac guy, is most the stuff you need to do better done on PC or can it be done on Mac's because they talk about opening a command line which of course is done in DOS. Can anyone shed light on this for me? Thanks in advance

adb is a part of the Google Android SDK. http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html It's available for Mac, PC, or Linux. Really, it boils down to preference. I believe setup is easier for Linux and Macs, but it's still pretty easy for a PC.
You can use Terminal, or whatever. It just needs a command-line interface for you to type into.

Thank you for the link and the explanation. I think its been to long since Ive had a open source device im way behind the curve i guess. Is there a good thread or a site for someone like me to start at that will start at the beginning and explain what SDK is and everything else?

Firstly, for a general how to of what's going on with our device, adb, so on and so forth, this thread is pretty awesome:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=709220
For a more in depth explanation of development and the like hit up:
http://developer.android.com
For the vast majority of what you're going to be doing, you need to be pretty familiar with command line scripts and the like. Also, if you want to write applications, you'll need to know java. If you really aren't all that interested in developing and just want to know about adb, that first link is a pretty good crash course.

Eclipse + Android SDK + JDNI/LDAP Access

Hi All,
For sometime I have been looking for a suitable Active Directory Management tool on a mobile device, however have never found anything which quite cuts the mustard. For this reason I have decided to give it a bash myself. I am the proud owner of a lovely shiny new Desire and it feels like it's just crying out for an app of this nature.
Just hoping I might be able to discuss a matter which requires some expertise. I have the latest versions of the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers and the SDK installed, so far I'm having much success with my first GUI builds after following a cracking tutorial Although I can handle the GUI elements (which I normally hate), I'm struggling to forge my first LDAP connection.
I have found info about the "Java Naming and Directory Interface" for java (*however no download) and just wondering if anyone else has had any success using it to code an Android app? I'm not digging for too much info for the moment, just trying to get some assurance that what I am trying to achieve is actually possible.
Not everyone's cup of tea, I know.. But decided it'd be worth asking.
Much Love,
Futurian

Replicate phone environment on PC?

Hey, I am entirely new to Android development. Is it possible to run Android OS inside a VM Player on my PC running Windows 7? I've done this with several flavors of Linux, but I dont know enough about how Android operates.
I'm not talking about just a development sandbox... a fully-functional installation of Android with networking capabilities would be the goal. Does anyone have experience with this?

First one with helpful answer gets a free iPad!!*
*some restrictions apply
----
EDIT: seriously, has nobody ever done this

Yes - see http://www.android-x86.org/
You can download a live cd version of Android compiled for x86 machines, and install it in your VM of choice. - Just pick Linux 2.6 as the host OS when creating your VM
(Though the Android emulator that comes with the SDK is pretty much fully functional, too, and more representative of an actual phone, since it's running Arm instructions rather than x86)

Cool, thanks for the tip
I havent played with the Emulator yet, or really gotten my hands dirty. Does the emulator just allow you to test your program, or does it emulate the entire OS- destop, applications, settings and all?
What I would really like to do (not sure if possible) is to do all the configuration for my phone OS via my PC, then just save the image and copy it to the phone. Starting to think this might not be easy

SilverStrings said:
I havent played with the Emulator yet, or really gotten my hands dirty. Does the emulator just allow you to test your program, or does it emulate the entire OS- destop, applications, settings and all?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The emulator in the SDK gives you pretty much a full phone environment (It's missing stuff like the google branded apps, but there are ways around that...)

[Q] How to change JAVA applications into Android Applications

So I have an application ready, but its written all in JAVA. I have the avd and sdk and eclipse all configured, but how would I change stuff like mouseListener into "touchListener". If you guys dont know what im talking about PM me xD?

siddysidsid said:
So I have an application ready, but its written all in JAVA. I have the avd and sdk and eclipse all configured, but how would I change stuff like mouseListener into "touchListener". If you guys dont know what im talking about PM me xD?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I dont have the answer you want, but you could always use the android java app. You can find it on google, it works with some java apps, cant guarantee it will support yours.

Unfortunately I do not think it is possible to turn a Java-based applications into Android without rewriting it. Even though the programming language is the same, the UI components of Android are different that standard Java.

It for sure is not possible to port it to Android without rewriting parts of it.
All UI stuff definitely needs to be adapted and/or rewritten. Also dependent on your application you have might have to optimize parts of it to work well with Android due to lower hardware specifications and so on.

Ahh well thats unfortunate. I was hoping for some kind of program that woudl do this for me.

Duplicate, thread closed.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=897686

What do you use to develop with?

I have been trying to learn how to do some android development for work and keep running into problems. I find it hard to believe that people are able to create a lot of these apps with the Google development tools in such poor condition.
I have set up a development system with eclipse and the android tools. One of the first problems I ran into is ADB crashing whenever I tried to debug and there was a device attached to the system. Didn't matter if I was trying to debug on the device or emulator, ADB would crash. I was finally able to get the problem fixed by using the Composite ADB interface driver instead of the plain ADB interface (would it really hurt Google to add one sentence to the directions to tell people this?)
Now every time I go to debug, the emulator comes up in Chinese/Japaneses. I type in English and it converts it. I can fix it by changing the input method, but I have to do it every time I start the emulator. I have Googled looking for a solution and have found this is a known problem that has been around for almost a year and there is no resolution with it. The bug reports I have found on the android site even lists them still as NEW!
When trying to debug a problem, I wanted to delete the shared preference file for the app as it seems like it had become corrupted and every time it went to read it, the app would force close. (And when this happen, the debugger perspective would come up but for the life of me, I could not find any information as to what caused the fault or any sort of stack trace to look back and see where in my code it failed).
If you are an app developer, are you running into these issues? Have you found ways to work around the problems? I just can't believe that this is the way people develop for this platform. I'm ready to tell my boss that we forget about the platform unless we can find some stable development tools, otherwise we will be spending more time fighting with the tools than working on the app.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would really like to hear them. I'm not a noob when it comes to software development (20+ years as a software engineer), but I have never seen development tools for such a major platform, be this poorly done. What am I missing?

I'm a professional developer as well too. 20 years or so as a C/C++ developer, but I've worked most of my career as a Unix developer. Naturally, I use linux where possible and my Eclipse setup on Gentoo linux is pretty stable. I tried on Win7-64 but it was buggy as heck. I believe that the problem is with Java. There seems to be so many ways to set it up wrong that I'm not sure you can set it up right under windows.
I find it ironic that Oracle is trying to sue Google for making a JVM that actually works!

I havent had any of your mentioned issues. I am running eclipse on a 32 vista machine and a 64 bit windows 7 machine.
Not sure what I may have done different that you for setup. But I followed the Android application development for dummies book. The author goes step by step of what to download and how to install and configure. Even though your software experience is way beyond this book maybe its worth picking it up to read the install notes.

FreeTheWorld said:
I havent had any of your mentioned issues. I am running eclipse on a 32 vista machine and a 64 bit windows 7 machine.
Not sure what I may have done different that you for setup. But I followed the Android application development for dummies book. The author goes step by step of what to download and how to install and configure. Even though your software experience is way beyond this book maybe its worth picking it up to read the install notes.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I picked up the book, "Sams Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 Hours" and it has a section for setting up the environment too. Followed it to the letter several times and always had this problems. I think the issue comes down to the books were written using version 6 and 7 of the SDK and the current version, 8, has introduced some problems the books don't cover. For example, the tools directory has been split into two directories, tools and platform-tools. When you first download the SDK, you don't get everything you had like before until you update the SDK.
I have talked to several other people who also had the problem with the ADB crashing like I did, even started a thread here about it. No one could get any help anywhere on resolving the issue. I think the problems I have that others don't see is because they started with an earlier version of the SDK.

Gene Poole said:
I'm a professional developer as well too. 20 years or so as a C/C++ developer, but I've worked most of my career as a Unix developer. Naturally, I use linux where possible and my Eclipse setup on Gentoo linux is pretty stable. I tried on Win7-64 but it was buggy as heck. I believe that the problem is with Java. There seems to be so many ways to set it up wrong that I'm not sure you can set it up right under windows.
I find it ironic that Oracle is trying to sue Google for making a JVM that actually works!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have also setup the development platform on a linux system and haven't had the problems I have with Windows 7 64bit. I also feel a lot of the problems have come from the Windows 64bit platform and even windows in general. I tried installing on a clean 64bit and 32bit Windows 7 and was still having the ADB problem. As soon as I get my tax refunds, I'm going to get a work desk setup at home so I can try using my linux system (it sits on the floor with no monitor and is my network server). Boss will really love it if I tell him we have to set up linux platforms to develop on. Guy is a bit of a tight wad when it comes to equipment.

edboston said:
If you are an app developer, are you running into these issues?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nope, I didn't have any stability problems with SDK. I use linux 32-bit, didn't try to work on a Windows, MacOS and/or 64-bit arch.

I've not seen any of your problems, either.
FYI, I followed these instructions to set up the env:
http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html
(Environment - WinXP/32 netbook)

Eclipse is buggy. The most annoying issue with it is that the auto complete freezes your computer at times.
An alternative is IntelliJ. They offer a free community addition. I work with one dev that swears by it.

I use Windows7x64 and Ubuntu 10.10 to develop my apps. I use IntelliJ mostly because I find Eclipse to be convoluted overcomplicated mess. I think the Android integration in Eclipse is better, especially around editing some of the key XML files but I despise how projects are organized in Eclipse.
The OS you use really doesn't matter the results are the same, once you're up and running the work will be the same so the OS becomes irrelevant. The IDE becomes the differentiator.

I haven't met with the issues you mentioned, but as you said it can be because I installed the sdk a long time ago (after google anounced the eclair). I'm using eclipse and yes, that program is full of bugs, but I read an article about developing for android in Netbeans (my personal favorite). You can read it here: http://androidportal.hu/2011-01-09/fejlesztes-androidra-netbeans-segitsegevel (it's hungarian, but google translate is our friend)
Sent from my GT-I5700 using XDA App

MotoDev Studio 2.01

stick to 32-bit Galileo
for the slow autocomplete problem, I've made sure to use eclipse Galileo, something in Helios was causing massive lag. Also make sure you're running the 32-bit version of eclipse, even if your machine is 64-bit, there are definitely some bugs last time I tried to install ADT on 64-bit eclipse.
the new tools directory was a bit of a pain after updating to the latest API but nothing too bad once you figured it out.
I haven't had many of the other problems you mentioned. I always debug with adb logcat from terminal, and you can always hop into the device with adb shell.

I use eclipse every day at work so I've kind of gotten used to all the little quirks. I had the chinese text problem with the emulator, but I do most of my testing on a real phone. I use the emulator just to try out different resolutions.