Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
Developing applications for Android, part 2
I had the Jitter code and most of the UI ported on Friday, and it all compiled then, but nothing really worked. In part because I ran into a problem with the build path for the project, that took a few hours to track down, and I’m still not quite sure if I made a mistake or there’s a real problem with ADT.
Anyway, this is how the application looks right now:
It’s rather user-hostile at the moment, and the only thing that really works end-to-end is Update. I can retrieve Timelines as well, but there’s a problem with accessing UI widgets from another thread. Probably perfectly logical, but I haven’t been able to understand why this is yet, and how to get around it.
Update and Timelines will probably be provided via separate screens rather than on the main screen. I have to test what works best. I will also try to show user thumbnails, format message text, extract clickable links and support emoticons.
As there’s already good Twitter applications (including Twidroid) for Android, I don’t expect my application to become a hit, if it even will be released publicly. It’s mainly a way for me to learn the application paradigm of Android. There might be an opportunity to make a specialized Twitter client, that adds GPS or cell position, sends messages based on incoming SMSs, attaches photos to the Tweets etc etc.
So far I’ve spent almost a work day (read: 8 hours) reading up on Android development, and close to two work days developing (and drinking lots of coffee, and cursing). I will need approx one more work day to get all Twitter features running, and probably one or two more for optimizing the UI, but lead time wise it will take at least a week.
