Our shiny new G1 arrived yesterday - now down to me to make something work on it! Lots of other folks have reviewed the device from a user perspective, generally coming to the conclusion that it is a great OS somewhat let down by the HTC hardware. Won't disagree with that view, but my focus here is going to be on app development for the beast.
Guess I am showing my age and deteriorating eyesight but I hate devices whose manuals only come on CD - always prefer paper given the choice. Once the manual painstakingly copied onto my PC desktop turned out to be the usual sort of standard - i.e. doesn't tell you much past the basics.
First challenge is simply to get the pathway worked out such that an app I create in eclipse over onto the G1 and fire it up.
Setting up the development environment under winxp is very smooth:
- Download the current (v1.0 r2) Android SDK and unpack in some sensible folder.
- Add https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/ to your list of eclipse plugin download sites and install everything you find there.
- Restart eclipse and in the new Android properties section stick in the path to the SDK directory.
- Extend your system path variable to include the SDK's tools directory.
To connect the shiny new phone to the PC so the debugger can see it you need to:
- On the phone go into settings-->applications-->development and switch on USB debugging.
- Connect the phone and when it screams about the missing driver point it towards the usb_driver subdir in the SDK folder.
- (Re)start eclipse and the phone should appear in the DDMS perspective.
> adb install HelloAndroid.apk
And there we are:
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The app will now have appeared in the DDMS perspective allowing heap and thread viewing etc, and you can then simply fire up the debug perspective and set breakpoints etc - all very smooth - works well.
UPDATE: Of course you can skip the adb bit and transfer and run the app in a single step from and Android style eclipse run/debug launch configuration!
PS. Credits - much of this process was picked up from here and here.
PPS. The latest carnival is up over at Mobscure - and my previous post on the Scottish Software Awards gets a mention.