Well milestone 1 is complete and everything’s going well. There was quite a bit of OT needed for the milestone just due to every task coming in more towards the high estimate than the average estimate I use to set milestone deadlines. Lots of unexpected trickiness to an unfamiliar platform to blame of course. The biggest problem was getting the download of the content bundle to work quickly. On my dev phone 2 (which is an unlocked HTC Magic) the download of a 6.5MB file takes 10 minutes or more. On the client’s Nexus One it takes about 10 seconds. It takes only a few seconds more on an Android developer that lives in New York’s Nexus One that helped me debug the issue on the Android beginners Google list.
I’m not sure what makes it so slow on my device, but I’ll definitely need to find out, otherwise I’ll be wasting too much time in development waiting for bundles to install.
Debugging on the Android emulator is brutally slow, so I’m doing all of my debugging directly on my Android Dev Phone 2. When you’re doing a lot of back and forth between writing code / testing it gets annoying picking it up and putting it down. I have solved the problem, and I can officially sell my solution to approximately 5 more people. Behold:
Yeah, that’s right. It’s the end of an eraser taped to my desk which allows me to prop my device up against the desk. I say that I can sell 5 more of these to interested parties because that’s about how much eraser I have left to chop bits off of.
I’ve been working on downloading and installing the content bundle for the Android version of Prescriber’s Letter. I’ve got the whole process working perfectly, however I’ve found that the system is extremely slow on the emulator. It takes an extremely long time to unzip the bundle, to parse the XML for the string table included in the bundle, and generally any file operations I’m doing. I’ll definitely need to Google this issue and find out where I’m going wrong performance-wise.
One thing I did was switched to BufferedInputStream and BufferedOutputStream, as I read that these would have better performance, which makes sense to me. I’ve adjusted the buffers to generally be able to hold the average file size entirely in the buffer, in the hopes that this reduces the final flush to the file to a single hit to the file system. I’m not sure whether it works like that internally, but I can hope!
Part of me suspects there’s just something funky going on with the emulator. I do notice that Eclipse starts to get slower and slower the more I switch tasks (DDMS / Java / Debug) perspectives throughout the day. I don’t know, hopefully Google will save me when I have the time to investigate.
I purchased these three e-books online. I came across them while asking questions on the Android beginners Google group. Their author, Mark Murphy is very active on this group answering newb’s questions on a regular basis with detailed and helpful answers. You can even get a full chapter sample to check it out and see whether the writing style jives with your style of learning.
I do recommend a book of some sort for starting out with Android. Without a book you’re sort of left to your own devices. You have to sniff around the Internet at every stage: “How do I use the Android database classes?”, “How do layouts work?”, you can spend a lot of time googling and following time wasting paths through pages that don’t give the answers you’re looking for. I was doing a lot of this and these books have cut down on that time drastically.
The Android project is coming along well. I’m spending a lot of time just thinking about how to best solve problems the Android way, a lesson I learned on the iPhone, to make sure I don’t back myself into bad corners that are hard to get out of.
