Relentless Inquiry

I am following a series of steps, some of which I’m discovering on the fly. I am writing them up, so that I can recreate them and so that other folks can benefit from the sound of my head banging against the wall without actually being in the room to hear the thump…thump…thump. And the horse might even learn to sing!

• Opened up the TalkAndroid.com How-To article
• Start verifying the system requirements therein. I need a dev environment, in this case, for MacOS X, XCode.
• Registered as an Apple Developer at developer.apple.com (hint, use your iTunes store login, it will prefill/prefetch your info).
• Downloaded the Mac OS X and iOS XCode development environment
• Downloaded the iPhone Configuration Utility I don’t need this for Android, but it was there and I have ideas.
• ant -version We need 1.6.5 or greater, and 1.8.1 came with XCode, so no worries there.
• java -version O frabjous day, what does this output mean vs the requirement for JDK 5 or 6? Thank you, stackoverflow.com java folks, for interpreting them in the JDK context. Blank you, Oracle, for splitting Java into multiple quasi-conflicting weirdass JDKs with 6.
• Use About This Mac under the apple menu to verify we don’t have an Intel Itanium, and in fact want the x64 Linux version of the JDK (there is no Mac option).
• Wonder if there is a Mac-specific JDK and if we will break the Mac by installing a generic JDK 6… decide to go look on developer.apple.com … OK, we don’t need to download JDK 6, we gots it with the OS.
• Oh look, an Eclipse convention ad for Santa Clara, later this month. Win. Wow. It’s *hugely* expensive, over $1500 for a 3 day conference. Lose.
• Also download the Eclipse Classic SDK 3.6.2 Unpack the tar.gz file in /Developer where I can keep track of it..
• Download the Eclipse IDE for MacOS X 64 bit I think it’s mostly a reskin for regular Eclipse, to make it friendlier to experienced Java programmers. Maybe. Installs as eclipse2, not eclipse. Hmm.
• Install the Eclipse ADT plugin. While I’m reading I realize I’m likely to not use the Java/Eclipse IDEs because I don’t really speak Java yet. But I’ll have the plugin, what’s another download at this point. And to think I used to complain about RPM dependencies…
• Note that the ADT plugin will take a looooong time to calculate dependencies. Your mac is not frozen.
• Downloaded Android SDK starter package, expand it under /Developer.
• /Developer/android-sdk-mac_x86/tools/android update sdk This brings up the GUI and I told it to install everything, even the old SDKs, so I can look at them and get to know stuff.
• Add export PATH=${PATH}:/Developer/android-sdk-mac_x86/tools:/Developer/android-sdk-mac_x86/platform-tools to your .bash_profile
• Bring up a browser window with the Android Hello World tutorial and see if stuff Actually Frickin’ Works… ooh, it assumes using the Eclipse IDE with ADT, good thing I installed that!
• Click the dialog box about unsigned content (tsk, ADT folks) and let Eclipse finish the install.
• NOW look at the Hello World tutorial… when you bring up Eclipse, there may be a mismatch between the tutorial and what you see, as per the next two steps
• Click OK on the dialog box about needing to tell Preferences where the android SDK is living.
• Open up Eclipse’s Preferences pane, choose Android, add the SDK location and pick a target. I’m going with Android 2.2 since that’s what I used to root my Nook Color (way back a few days ago, remember we are doing this so we can play on the new tablet… yes, it builds character TOO)
• Rest of tutorial is fairly correct. Although some of Eclipse’s panes have changed with the newest release, you can find the right fields to fill in.

And we have a successful Hello World!