A little bit of information about our guest speaker Mr. Chuck Hudson, the co-founder of Control UI, and currently Director of Control4 and he is Co Author of HTML 5 Developer’s cookbook. We had a very good, informative class with Mr. Chuck Hudson and Dr. Craig Piercy. We went through Android and iphone development basics and a sample temperature conversion application that its major functionality was to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius.
Here are what you need to develop an android application:
The Android SDK is available for free at: http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
The Android SDK comes with all the tools and APIs you need to write and debug your Android applications. It also includes the Android Emulator, allowing you to test most of your applications without needing a real device. Obviously, for some applications (such as those using the hardware of an Android device like camera, Bluetooth, etc) you would need a real device and the emulator will not fit the bill.
For developing Android applications, you can use the Eclipse IDE (download free here). Once the Eclipse IDE is installed, you need to install a custom plug-in called the Android Development Tools (ADT). This tool adds Android project support in Eclipse and should be downloaded and installed by all Android developers.
So, here is the summary of the steps you need to perform in order to start developing Android applications:
- Download and setup the Eclipse IDE
- Download the Android SDK and then expand the content of the zip file into a folder
- Install the ADT plug-in in Eclipse
- Configure Eclipse to point to the Android SDK
Here are what you need to develop an iphone application:
The first thing you’re going to need to do is download and install the iPhone SDK on you apple iOS.This is going to give you everything you need in order to build apps – XCode, iPhone Simulator, and Interface Builder. Downloading and installing the SDK is totally free. You’ll have to pay $99 if you want to run the app on a real iPhone or distribute it to the app store. For the purposes of learning, though, the simulator works just fine.
So you create an application in Xcode, build the user interface in Interface Builder and run it in the iPhone Simulator.
The main framework that you most likely will become most familiar with is Cocoa Touch. Among other things it contains the UIKit framework and the address book UI framework. It also supports windowing, events and user-interface management plus much more. The main concepts that you need to wrap your head around are:The basic flow Xcode uses for producing an app,The frameworks available, what is responsible for which type of functionality, Objective-c. The language used to program in Xcode.
He went over the challenges that device development market has and how Beta testing is important, another important aspect after development is Localization as devices are used in all over the world, although most of the people are using English even if they have access to their native language on their mobile device.
Apple distribution is for launching the iphone application, Ad Hoc program is for distributing to limited people but when you have a production release you can upload your application through iTunes Connect, the application must be signed properly with the developer’s certificate to be identified for updates and sale.
Android distribution is more accessible and you can do free uploads to the Android Market Place. It is very easy to get an account and upload your application.
Before uploading your application is best to get an understanding how successful is the outcome of your application by using Google analytics for websites or similar tools, and ensure the application is unique and has good design and functionality.
Hope this helps you to start working on mobile development and enjoy the new challenge.