4 in 4
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
This week I used ITP’s 4 in 4 Project Challenge (do one project a day for four days) as a kind of mobile development crash course. I’ve sort of done mobile development using Textmarks, but I’d never built a native application for any particular platform. This week I learned Android and BlackBerry. I dedicated a day to each platform to set up their respective development environments and playing with Hello World, and one day each for a real application for Android and BlackBerry. I will post the Charlie Rose schedule application for Android and BlackBerry when they are solid and ready for download. My experience is detailed in the 4 previous entries.
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Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Sometimes you might be out trying to decide whether or not you should head home early for Charlie Rose. It’s a tough call when you don’t know who’s on. When you look at the channel guide on the TV, it doesn’t tell you who’s on that night. So here is the Charlie Rose app for BlackBerry. When you launch it, it tells you who’s on tonight and, if applicable, tomorrow night.
The app hits this php script and displays the text on the device. I figure if I let the app hit the script for the data, I can manipulate the script later on without asking people to update their version of the application. This app was considerably easier to develop than the Android version, due to BlackBerry’s more direct way of displaying text. When writing your code, I strongly recommend using Eclipse as your development environment. The BlackBerry JDE is utter crap. I’ve heard that JDE plugins for Eclipse are also crap, so you can simply add net_rim_api.jar (located in the lib folder of your BlackBerry JDE Component Package) to your Eclipse Java project as an external Jar file and start coding. Here’s a screenshot of the Charlie Rose app for BlackBerry. When the app is packaged and ready for download, you will find it on Summer Mittens.
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Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Today, I set up my BlackBerry development environment. To do this, I installed version 4.2.1 of the JDE which came highly recommended. From there, this Hello World tutorial was dead simple. However, there are lots of other fun things to do with the BlackBerry, like connecting to the Internet, that are not so simple. These things require MDS. It took a small village, but I was ultimately able to connect the simulator to the web. To do this, I installed the JDE Component Package 4.6. This sounds relatively simple, but at times during the process I found myself tearing up. I was eventually able to get ahold of myself, and my simulator connects to the web. Tomorrow I will do a Charlie Rose app for BlackBerry and post the results.
Here are two excellent guides to you help build your app:
BlackBerry_Application_Developer_Guide_Volume_1
BlackBerry_Application_Developer_Guide_Volume_2
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
Sometimes you might be out trying to decide whether or not you should head home early for Charlie Rose. That’s difficult when you don’t know who’s on. When you look at the channel guide on the TV, it doesn’t tell you who’s on that night. So here is the Charlie Rose app for Android. When you launch it, it tells you who’s on tonight and tomorrow night.
The app hits this php script and displays the text on the device. I figure if I let the app hit the script for the data, I can manipulate the script later on without asking people to update their version of the application. I spent most of my time scraping together this app and not enough time understanding why it doesn’t work all the time, so by the time I got the script all tidy and in a presentable state, my app wasn’t connecting to the Internet. I’ve read that the Android emulator itself is buggy. Regardless of whether it’s my fault or Android’s, debugging has been basically impossible due to connection issues on the emulator. Here’s a screenshot of one of the early occasions that it worked. When the app is totally finished and ready to go, it’ll be posted on Summer Mittens.
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Monday, January 12th, 2009
Here’s what Hello World, built using Eclipse, looks like for Android. I followed this great tutorial from Perk Mobile, a company from which a few guys visited us in Designing Around Place last fall. It details the process of setting up the Android SDK for Eclispe and the Hello World example. Now onto bigger and better apps. Hoefully there will be one sitting under above this post at this time tomorrow.
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