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by badhairday
5045 days ago
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"Difficult documentation, impossible for me to figure out how to do anything gui-related." Why is this? Do you have much experience programming in Java? The Android Developer [1] website is a fantastic resource for learning about both the design and development standards on the platform. The User Interface Guide [2] is particularly exceptional at explaining how to implement different UI components on a technical level. [1] http://developer.android.com/
[2] http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/overview.html |
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I'm really really proficient in Java. I used to teach it in school, I've done it professionally, etc. So I had no trouble at all writing the actual "guts" of the app, or even the android-specific APIs. And while I'm not great at swing/awt, I can make it work if I need to.
But it really breaks down when I get to the Android gui+os-specific things. I find myself having to memorize (and reference, and re-reference) words like Activity, Intent, Bundle, View, etc. You have many kinds of menus and dialogs - options menus, preferences menus, etc.
Of course, all of the information is there, and perhaps it's worth reading all of it, one page at a time, in order become a proficient android programmer. But it's so specific to that one platform, and has has such a new set of vocabulary which isn't common anywhere else in computing, that I personally have found it really difficult.
It looks like the documentation has gotten much, much better over the past couple of years, so maybe you've inspired me to give it a fair shake. But I really wanted to "jump in and build" and that has a much larger learning curve than I would have liked.