Monday, 20 June 2011

Starting out with App Inventor

As an Electronic Engineering student due to start my final year in October this year, I have decided that my final year project will involve developing an app for Android (I have already got a particular program in mind, but will elaborate on that later). My supervisor has suggested that I maintain a blog of my experiences, as it will hopefully serve as a useful reminder of what I have done, and may be useful to future students.


I have purchased a Samsung Galaxy S2, since it comes with the features (accelerometer, magnetometer, GPS) required for the final app I intend to make. The first step so far has been to play around with Google's App Inventor service, and complete the provided tutorials.


App Inventor is designed for complete beginners, and requires no previous programming experience (I have a little C++ knowledge, but having carried out some research it seems that Java is the preferred language for Android, and Eclipse the most highly recommended IDE). It is a good way to get a general feel for how an app comes together, but its abilities are limited, and apps built using App Inventor can not be uploaded to the Android marketplace.


Having completed most of the tutorials, and built a few basic apps of my own (see later posts for details), the next step will be to install Eclipse, download the Android SDK, and start to code apps using Java.

No comments:

Post a Comment