How to Setup Android Development Environment? Part 2 (Windows)

CONTINUE OF PART 1.

Step 3: Installing Eclipse

Eclipse comes in a couple of different flavors. For Android developers, I suggest using Eclipse for Java Developers version 3.6, Like the Android SDK, Eclipse comes in the form of a ZIP or tar gzip package. Simply extract it to a folder of your choice. Once it’s uncompressed, you can create a nice little shortcut on your desktop to the eclipse executable in the root directory of your Eclipse installation. The first time you start Eclipse, you will be prompted to specify a workspace directory. 

Figure 2. Choosing a workspace

A workspace is Eclipse’s notion of a folder containing a set of projects. Whether you use a single workspace for all your projects or multiple workspaces that group just a few projects is completely up to you. The sample projects accompanying this book are all organized in a single workspace, which you could specify in this dialog. For now, we’ll simply create an empty workspace somewhere.

Eclipse will then greet us with a welcome screen, which we can safely ignore and close. This will leave us with the default Eclipse Java perspective. We’ll get to know Eclipse a little better in a later section. For now it suffices to have it running.

Step 4: Installing the ADT Eclipse Plug-In

The last piece in our setup puzzle is installing the ADT Eclipse plug-in. Eclipse is based on a plug-in architecture that is used to extend its capabilities by third-party plug-ins. The ADT plug-in marries the tools found in the Android SDK with the powers of Eclipse. Given this combination, we can completely forget about invoking all the command-line

Android SDK tools; the ADT plug-in integrates them transparently into our Eclipse workflow.

Installing plug-ins for Eclipse can be done either manually, by dropping the contents of a plug-in ZIP file into the plug-ins folder of Eclipse, or via the Eclipse plug-in manager integrated with Eclipse. Here we’ll choose the second route.

1. To install a new plug-in, go to Help > Install New Software..., which will open the installation dialog. In this dialog you can choose from which source to install what plug-in. First, you have to add the plug-in repository from which the ADT plug-in is fetched. Click the Add button, and you will be presented with the dialog depicted in Figure 3.

2. In the first text field, you can enter the name of the repository; something like “ADT repository” will do. The second text field specifies the URL of the repository. For the ADT plug-in, this field should be https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/. Note that this URL might be different for newer versions, so check the ADT plug-in site for an up-to-date link.

Figure 3. Adding a repository

3. After you’ve confirmed the dialog, you’ll be brought back to the installation dialog, which should now be fetching the list of available plug-ins in the repository. Check the Developer Tools check box and click the Next button.

4. Eclipse will now calculate all the necessary dependencies, and then present you a new dialog that lists all the plug-ins and dependencies that are going to be installed. Confirm that dialog with a click on the Next button.

5. Yet another dialog will pop up, prompting you to accept the licenses of each plug-in to be installed. You should of course accept those licenses, and finally initiate the installation with a click on the Finish button.

6. Finally, Eclipse will ask you whether it should restart to apply the changes. You can opt for a full restart or for applying the changes without a restart. To play it safe, choose Restart Now, which will restart Eclipse as expected.

After all this dialog madness, you’ll be presented with the same Eclipse window as before. The toolbar features a couple of new buttons specific to Android, which allow you to start the SDK and AVD manager directly from within Eclipse, as well as create new Android projects. Figure 4 shows these new shiny toolbar buttons.

Figure 4. ADT toolbar buttons

The first button on the left allows you to open the AVD and SDK Manager. The next button is a shortcut to creating a new Android project. The other two buttons will create a new unit test project or Android manifest file (functionality we won’t use in this book). As one last step in finishing the installation of the ADT plug-in, you have to tell the plugin where the Android SDK is located.

1. Open Window > Preferences, and select Android in the tree view in the upcoming dialog.

2. On the right side, click the Browse button to chose the root directory of your Android SDK installation.

3. Click the OK button to close the dialog, and you’ll finally able to create your first Android application.

Conclusion

This is how you set up development environment for Android Development. You can take a quick tour of Eclipse from this post for getting started with your development environment. Happy Sharing :)

How to Setup Android Development Environment? Part 1 (Windows)

Android Smartphone is one of the most competitive mobile platforms which come after the Apple’s iOS in mobile market share. So, it would be very good choice to develop for Android platform. If you want to know what is about Android, please see this post by me. In this post I am going to write about setting up the Android Development Environment in your Computer.

The Android SDK is pretty flexible and integrates well with a couple of development environments. Some might choose to go all hard-core with command-line tools. But I want things to be a little bit more comfortable, though, so I’ll go for the simpler, more visual route using an IDE (integrated development environment). Here’s the grocery list of software that needs to downloaded and installed in the given order:

1. The Java Development Kit (JDK), version 5 or 6. Going for 6 is preferred.
2. The Android Software Development Kit (Android SDK).
3. Eclipse for Java Developers, version 3.4 or 3.5.
4. The Android Development Tools (ADT) plug-in for Eclipse.

Let’s go through steps required to set everything up properly.

Step 1: Setting Up the JDK

Download the JDK with one of the specified versions for your operating system. On most systems it comes in the form of an installer or package, so there shouldn’t be any hurdles. Once the JDK is installed, it is advisable to add a new environment variable called JDK_HOME pointing to the root directory of the JDK installation. Additionally, it is better to add the $JDK_HOME/bin (%JDK_HOME%\bin on Windows) directory to your PATH environment variable.

Step 2: Setting Up the Android SDK

The Android SDK is also available for the three mainstream desktop operating systems. Choose the one fitting for your platform and download it. The SDK comes in the form of a ZIP or tar gzip file. Just uncompress it to a convenient folder (e.g., c:\android-sdk on Windows or /opt/android-sdk on Linux). The SDK comes with a couple of command-line utilities located in the tools/ folder. Create an environment variable called ANDROID_HOME pointing to the root directory of the SDK installation and add $ANDROID_HOME/tools (%ANDROID_HOME%\tools on Windows) to your PATH environment variable. This way you can easily invoke the command-line tools from a shell later on if the need arises.

After performing the preceding steps, you’ll have bare-bones installation that consists of the basic command-line tools needed to create, compile, and deploy Android projects, as well as the SDK and AVD manager, a tool for installing SDK components and creating virtual devices used by the emulator. These tools alone are not sufficient to start developing, so you need to install additional components. That’s where the SDK and AVD manager comes in. The manager is a package manager, much like the package management tools you find on Linux. The manager allows you to install the following types of components:

Android platforms: For every official Android release there’s a platform component for the SDK that includes the runtime libraries, a system image used by the emulator, and any version-specific tools. SDK add-ons: Add-ons are usually external libraries and tools that are not specific to a platform. Some examples of these are the Google APIs that allows you to integrate Google maps in your application.

USB driver for Windows: These are necessary for running and debugging your application on a physical device on Windows. On Mac OS X and Linux you don’t need a special driver.

Samples: For each platform there’s also a set of platform-specific samples. These are great resources for seeing how to achieve specific goals with the Android runtime library.

Documentation: This is a local copy of the documentation for the latest Android framework API. Being the greedy developers we are, we want to install all of these components to have the full set of functionality at our disposal. For this, we first have to start the SDK and AVD manager. On Windows there’s an executable called SDK manager.exe in the root directory of the SDK. On Linux and Mac OS X you simply start the script android in the tools directory of the SDK.

Upon first startup, the SDK and AVD manager will connect to the package server and fetch a list of available packages. It will then present you with the dialog in Figure 1, which allows you to install individual packages. Simply check Accept All, click the Install button, and make yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee. The manager will take a while to install all the packages.

Figure 1: First contact with the SDK and AVD manager

You can use the SDK and AVD manager at any time to update components or install new ones. The manager is also used to create new AVDs, which will be necessary later on when we start running and debugging our applications on the emulator. Once the installation process is finished, we can move on to the next step in setting up our development environment.

For next step please go through How to Setup Android Development Environment? Part 2 . Thanks and Happy Sharing!

Things to know before going for Android Development!

Android Development platform is one of the growing mobile development platform which is gradually taking market share.  If you are thinking of doing some android development, then the following information might be helpful to you to have some overview on Android Development. You can skip this section and jump to “Setting Up Android Development Environment”, but knowing background of the platform is more helpful to make the vision of what you are doing.

A Brief History of Android

Android was first publicly noticed in 2005 when Google acquired a small startup called Android, Inc. In 2008, the release of version 1.0 of Android put an end to all speculation, and Android became the new challenger on the mobile market. Since then, it’s been battling it out with already established platforms such as iOS (then called iPhone OS) and BlackBerry, and its chances of winning look rather good.

Why Android?

1. Because Android is open source.
2. Handset manufacturers have a low barrier of entry when using the new platform.
3. They can produce devices for all price segments, modifying Android itself to accommodate the processing power of a specific device.
4. Android is therefore not limited to high-end devices but can also be deployed to low budget devices, thus reaching a wider audience.
5. A crucial ingredient for Android’s success was the formation of the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) in late 2007. The OHA includes companies such as HTC, Qualcomm, Motorola, and NVIDIA, which collaborate to develop open standards for mobile devices. Although Android’s core is developed mainly by Google, all the OHA members contribute to its source in one form or another.

Android itself is a mobile operating system and platform based on the Linux kernel version 2.6 and is freely available for commercial and noncommercial use. Many members of the OHA build custom versions of Android for their devices with modified user interfaces (UIs)—for example, HTC’s HTC Sense and Motorola’s MOTOBLUR. The open source nature of Android also enables hobbyists to create and distribute their own versions of Android. 

Since its release in 2008, Android has received seven version updates which are as follows:

1. Version 1.1 (No code name)
2. Cupcake (Version 1.5 )
3. Donut (Version 1.6 )
4. Eclair (Version 2.0)
5. Froyo (Version 2.2)
6. Gingerbread (Version 2.3)
7. Honeycomb (Version 3.0)

Fragmentation

The great flexibility of Android comes at a price: companies that opt to develop their own user interfaces have to play catch-up with the fast pace at which new versions of Android are released. This can lead to handsets not older than a few months becoming outdated really fast as carriers and handset manufacturers refuse to create updates that incorporate the improvements of new Android versions. The big bogeyman called fragmentation is a result of this process. Fragmentation has many faces. For the end user, it means being unable to install and use certain applications and features because of being stuck on an old Android version. For developers, it means that some care has to be taken when creating applications that should work on all versions of Android. While applications written for earlier versions of Android will usually run fine on newer versions, the reverse is not true. Some features added in newer Android versions are of course not available on older versions, such as multi-touch support. Developers are thus forced to create separate code paths for different versions of Android.

But fear not. Although this sounds terrifying, it turns out that the measures that have to be taken are minimal. Most often, we can even completely forget about the whole issue and pretend there’s only a single version of Android. If we are a game developer, we’re less concerned with differences in APIs and more concerned about hardware capabilities. This is a different form of fragmentation, which is also a problem for platforms such as iOS, albeit not as pronounced.

The Role of Google

Although Android is officially the brainchild of the Open Handset Alliance, Google is the clear leader when it comes to implementing Android itself as well as providing the necessary ecosystem for Android to grow.

The Android Open Source Project

Google’s efforts are summarized under the name Android Open Source Project. Most of the code is licensed under Apache License 2, a very open and nonrestrictive license compared to other open source licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL). Everyone is free to use this source code to build their own systems. However, systems that are claimed to be Android compatible first have to pass the Android Compatibility program, a process ensuring baseline compatibility with third-party applications written by developers like us. Compatible systems are allowed to participate in the Android ecosystem, which also includes the Android Market.

The Android Market

The Android Market was opened to the public in October 2008 by Google. It’s an online software store that enables users to find and install third-party applications. The market is generally accessible through the market application on a device as well as from the online internet browser.

The market allows third-party developers to publish their applications either for free or as paid applications. Paid applications are available for purchase in only about 30 countries before but now it has added many more countries. Selling applications as a developer has also been widely increased than before. Please check http://android.marketplace.com for further details.

The Software Development Kit

To develop applications for Android, the Android software development kit (SDK) is used. The SDK is composed of a comprehensive set of tools, documentation, tutorials, and samples that will help you get started in no time. Also included are the Java libraries needed to create applications for Android. These contain the APIs of the application framework. All major desktop operating systems are supported as development environments.

The prominent features of the SDK are as follows:

1. The debugger, capable of debugging applications running on a device or in the emulator
2. A memory and performance profile to help you find memory leaks and identify slow code
3. The device emulator, based on QEMU (an open source virtual machine to simulate different hardware platforms), which, although accurate, can be a bit slow at times
4. Command-line utilities to communicate with devices
5. Build scripts and tools to package and deploy applications

The SDK can be integrated with Eclipse, a popular and feature-rich open source Java integrated development environment (IDE). The integration is achieved through the Android Development Tools (ADT) plug-in, which adds a set of new capabilities to Eclipse to create Android projects; to execute, profile and debug applications in the emulator or on a device; and to package Android applications for their deployment to the Android Market. Note that the SDK can also be integrated into other IDEs such as NetBeans. There is, however, no official support for this. The SDK and the ADT plug-in for Eclipse receive constant updates that add new features and capabilities. It’s therefore a good idea to keep them updated. Alongside any good SDK comes extensive documentation. Android’s SDK does not fall short in this area and comes with a lot of sample applications. You can also find a developer guide and a full API reference for all the modules of the application framework at here. For Setting up your Android SDK, please go through this post by me.

The Developer Community

Part of the success of Android is its developer community, which gathers in various places around the Web. The most frequented site for developer exchange is the Android Developers group at this group. This is the number one place to ask questions or seek help when you stumble across a seemingly unsolvable problem. The group is visited by all sorts of Android developers, from system programmers, to application developers, to game programmers. Occasionally, the Google engineers responsible for parts of Android also help out with valuable insights.

Registration is free, and I highly recommend starting reading the group now! Apart from providing a place for you to ask questions, it’s also a great place to search for already answered questions and solutions to problems. So, before asking a question, check whether it has been answered already.


Hope this information might be useful for getting some vision on how to go on with Android Development.

SAFF U-16 Championship: Final Score of Nepal Vs Bangladesh Football Match!

Today, aug 10, 2011 Nepal Faced Bangladesh for 3rd place. Nepal defeated Bangladesh by 2-1. Below is given a live tweets to know match statistics.

Final Sore of Nepal Vs Bangladesh SAFF U-16 Full Time

Nepal 2 : 1 Bangladesh

Congratulation to Nepal for Being Third in SAFF U-16.

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Latest New: Pakistan Wins the SAFF U-16 Championship

India: 2th Position

Nepal : 3rd Position

Maldives: 5th Position

SAFF U-16 Championship Final: Full Time India Vs Pakistan Football Match!

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India is facing Pakistan for SAFF U-16 Championship in Final here in kathmandu, Nepal. I will be doing live updates of the match. The game will be held on the Dashrath Rangashala, Kathmandu Nepal. 

The match starts at 3:30 pm Nepal Time. Here currently time is 9:49 am Morning. The game starts at 3:30 pm. Wait for the Final game. The weather currently around the stadium is very cool, its rather sunny day. However we can see some clouds over in this morning. I will be back on 3:30 pm for live tweet updates. Please stay with me.

Final Score of Final Match Between India And Pakistan

Pakistan 2 : 1 India

Pakistan winds the SAFF U-16 Championship. Big Congratulation to Pakistan.

SAFF U-16 Championship: Final Score of Nepal Vs India Football Match!

Nepal is facing India in the second semifinal match of the SAFF U-16 Championship here in kathmandu Nepal. I will be doing live updates of the match between Nepal and india. Nepal has entered the semifinal as a group winner with one draw and one win while india as runner up with one win and one loss. The game will be held on the Dashrath Rangashala, Kathmandu Nepal. 

The match starts at 3:30 pm Nepal Time. Here currently time is 3:08 pm. The game starts at 3:30 pm. Wait for the Nepal Vs India Game. The weather currently around the stadium is very cool, neither hot nor cold. The cloudy weather is making the huge fans comfortable and are eager to watch the game. 

• Recently the match between Pakistan and Bangladesh has been finished.
• Pakistan beat Bangladesh U-16 2-0 to enter final of SAFF U-16 Championship.

Final Score of Pakistan Vs Bangladesh

Pakistan 2 - 0 Bangladesh


Final Sore of Nepal Vs India Semi Final SAFF U-16 Full Time
Nepal 1 : 1 India

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Final Score of Match in Plenty Shoot Out
Nepal 2 : 4 India


India Wins the Game! India Enters to Final.

Coming Matches :

India Vs Pakistan - Final, 

Nepal Vs Bangladesh - 3rd Place, 

Sri Lanka Vs Maldives - 5th Place. 

Stay With Me For Each n Every Details.

What are mobile Development Scopes and Opportunities? (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone 7)

Today’s world is the digital world. Everything is digitizing day by day and taking more advanced form. Zero’s (0) and One’s (1) has become the inseparable component of human life. Computers, Smartphone’s, Internet are the must have part of the people’s life. Almost 90% of people in the world can’t sustain their life without these tech stuffs. People are so much relying on these technical stuffs that it’s very good opportunity for developers like us being part of digital creation world.

Want to learn developing for iPhone, Android, Blackberry?

I am a developer, software developer. The word software development is very vague term. And has very wide range of scope. Earlier, at my time when I used be in Engineering College, software development generally means creation of software for computers i.e. Desktop applications. On due course, development of desktop applications began to fall after rise in Internet, World Wide Web (WWW). Website development was becoming and is still great field for software development. Today, you can do everything in website when you have computer and it’s great that limitation of installing software in each computers has been overthrown by the websites. Google website is a top search engine in the world, and there are tones of examples of great websites which has made our life really easy and comfortable in terms of managing our work database or our business transactions.

Software Development for Mobile Devices

Currently cell phone or mobile phone is the prime target of business purpose. Every people carry mobile devices rather than computers. So, developing for mobile is gaining huge popularity because you will have millions of customers directly in your touch. People do almost everything such as texting, calling, gaming, internet surfing in mobile these days. So, within few years, mobiles and smart phones are going to overcome the computer internet users.

Mobile phone production is great business platform. After Apple introduced iPhone in 2007, the standard way of living life with iPhone revolutionized the Mobile & Smartphones World. After the huge success of iPhone, many other mobile production companies started the manufacture varieties of phones with touch capability. The top mobile platforms that have great market share are as follows:

1. Apple’s Iphone
2. Google’s Android
3. Microsofts Windows Phone 7
4. RIM’s Blackberry
5. Symbian QT

Why become Mobile Developer?

If you are interested in mobile development and seeking the opportunity as mobile developer, I will say you are in right place and you are going to choose right path for your future. When you complete your Computer Science or Engineering, you would have load of options to choose where should I go, in which platform? I preferred Mobile development Platform and I am going to write about the future of mobile developers and how can we sustain our life.

As a mobile developer you will have opportunity to learn new tool and technology. All you need to know to start mobile developing is your basic OOP programming C++ and / or Java. Once you have strong knowledge of any OOP language (preferred C++) getting started with development of mobile devices won’t take long.

After huge success of iPhone, different mobile platform invented the different mobile devices and respective developer programs. The Developer Program is the best opportunity for the programmers as well as the owner of developer program. The iPhone got only success because it has app store with millions of quality apps which would be sold directly to the iPhone users. The most quality apps in the appstore, more the customers will be satisfied and all these apps are made by the developers who are registered in their program.

The android development program is also getting huge success after Apple. It has lots of free apps than paid apps. Any development platform will succeed only if it has quality apps in their market app store. And market will have quality apps only if they have good and great developers. So, you can be that developer and sustain your life, selling your app in your app store after getting registered in their developer program.

You can register as either individual or as a company. All the provisioning and device certificates are managed with developer program. All you have to do is pay certain charge per year and submit as much as you can in their market place for selling. For Apple iPhone developer program you have to pay $99 per year, for Android developer program ($25 registration fee). For more about comparison between iPhone and Android Developer Program read this article.

Opportunities And Scope

As a mobile developer you can create your own business. Most of the work could be the client work but you can create your own games without having to depend with other clients. Games are one of the most sold apps in all appstore which is great opportunity for us. All mobile owners would definitely want to play games in their mobile along with other tasks. Blackberry platform has its developer and market share declining day by day because it’s very hard to make game in Blackberry platform and sell it. So, most analysts says, it is a dying platform in mobile world. And as for the scope, you guys know we all have smart phones. Without phones, life sucks.

Well this much for today, I will write more on this topic and I know you can rock the world with your developing skill. Your development can go to the hand of million mobile users. So, be prepared for that and show what you can give, developers.