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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss the Facebook outage, the Facebook whistleblower, and more.
Robert in Miami listens Online and is participating by clicking the AskDave button on our site and asked: “I have an interest in developing my own Android apps for phones. I did some minor programming in the past, in Wildcat Basic, if anyone out there remembers what that is. I haven’t really done much in that field in a long time, but I’d like to get involved in building custom Android apps for phones. Possibly just for myself. Can you point me in the right direction for resources on that and instructional materials?”
Robert, what youll need will vary a little bit depending on what you want to build, but roughly youll want Android Studio which is Googles IDE (integrated development environment) for Android. Android Studio is pretty clunky and heavyweight, think something like Eclipse if youre familiar with it, but it does the job and comes with plenty of useful tools.
After that, the main source of documentation will be Google as well. Their documentation site can be found at developer.android.com.
Google has added some basic courses which are really not courses on that site, but you can at least browse through sample code, read their guidelines, and go through their developer guides.
Outside of Googles own documentation, the usual resources apply. If you can put up with their overinflated egos and bad attitudes, Stackoverflow can be useful, and there are specific Android-only tags and communities within Stackoverflow to dig into.
You can also search for the user androiddevelopers on YouTube for visual tutorials.
Youll find plenty of tutorials online as well, if you have a specific build in mind, so searching for something similar to what you want to build may give you an idea of what steps will be required and help you get started on your own project.
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