1. Introduction to Mobile
Application
Development on
Android
Julian Shen

2. A bird?
A plane?
Not a Super man either

3. Smart Phone

4. 4
• Make a phone call
• Surfing internet
• Manage your schedule
• .....
A smart phone can

5. 5
Who uses smart
phone?

6. Everybody could own
oneThanks to Apple and iPhone

7. So...now you may
know

8. Why should you
develop a mobile
application?
Make money

9. What’s your target
users?
Everybody
Knowing your users well

10. But, there is one more
thing you should know

11. 11
It’s a phone not a PC
• Less memory, less computing power
• Battery is its food
• Internet connection is not always on and stable
• Some operations cost user money
• Lot of hardware combination
• Different screen size
• With/without GPS
• Capacitive/Resistive/No touch screen
• ....

12. Application design
philosophy

13. 13
What is a good
mobile application?
• Decent user interface
• Better performance
• Consume less power

14. 14
A Good User
Interface
• Should be pretty but not only pretty
• Should be also
• Reasonable
• Predictable
• Responsive
• Easy to operate by fingers

15. 15
What you should
avoid
• Complex and meaningless gestures
• Meaningless animations
• Inconsistent UI behaviors
• Too many operating steps
• Hidden steps
• Long run logic in UI thread
• Block user (Progress dialog is not so good)
• Any assumption

16. 16
Performance
• Always think about the worst case
• IO costs
• Network is slow
• Long run (or busy) process consumes
battery
• Background is good but also evil

17. You don’t like to see this

19. Introduction to
Android

20. 20
Android is
• A mobile platform
• A Google’s product
• Linux + Java
• Source is available to public

21. 21
Version History
• 1.0 - Sep 2008
• 1.1 - Feb 2009
• 1.5 Cupcake - April 2009
• 1.6 Donut - Sep 2009
• 2.0/2.1 Eclair - Oct 2009 (2.0), Jan 2010
(2.1)
• 2.2 Froyo - May 2010
• 2.3(?) Gingerbread - 2010(?)

22. Architecture

23. 23
Application
Fundamentals
• By default, every application runs on its
own process
• Applications could share process
• Each process has its own JVM
• By default, each application has a
unique Linux UID
• It’s possible to share same UID for two
different application
• Every process has its own memory limit

24. 24
Application
Components
• Activities
• Services
• Broadcast receivers
• Content providers

25. What you need
before developing an
Android application?

26. JAVA

27. Eclipse

28. Android SDK and
ADT
Get it from http://www.android.com

29. SDK document
Read it online : http://www.android.com

30. What else you might
be interested?

31. Android Open Source
Check how to get it from http://source.android.com

32. 32
Why you might need
Android sources?
• Android document sucks
• Trust no one! Truth is in the sources
• Many applications could be taken as
examples

33. 33
Other way to develop
• Adobe AIR
• HTML

34. First step to Android

35. 35
Create an Android
project
• Specify project name
• Target platform
• Application properties
• Every application with UI starts from
an Activity

36. View Hierarchy

37. 37
Layout
• Create a new layout
• Add a button
• Assign an ID to this button
• Add on click action to this button
• Loading layout resource
• Accessing button from codes

38. 38
Application
Resources
• Layout
• Drawables
• Strings
• Colors
• Styles
• ...

39. 39
Run and Debug
• Create an AVD
• Run application
• Using DDMS
• Check UI hierarchy from hierarchy
viewer

40. Traceview

41. May force be with
you