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soralapio

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Android development is hell of fun!

Up until very recently, I've only been coding up stuff for PCs. Mostly in C#, but also in Java, Python and the like.  
 
Recently it dawned on me that I'd bought an HTC Desire phone last summer with the intention of developing software for it. I've been interested in mobile development for ages, but never just bothered learning the tools used by Nokia, Ericsson etc. Android was supposed to change all that, but I never just got around to it. Until recently. I realized that I'm finishing my third year of school and will soon have a bachelor's degree in computer science.  It would probably improve my chances of getting employed, if I could whip out a mobile portfolio in addition to the full-fledged games I've developed. 
 
So, last Saturday I downloaded the necessary software, configured Eclipse (eurgh, why'd it have to be Eclipse? Why couldn't Google design their SDK plugins for Netbeans) and got to work. A couple of hours later I had a simple program which displayed cat pictures. When you press a button, a new cat is shown. Simple. It also demonstrated that mobile development is extremely easy. On Android phones it's just Java with a couple of funny terms thrown in. Of course that is just a tiny part of development in any system. Syntax is syntax, but you have to understand the APIs and the system's limitations. 
 
Step by step I'm improving my skills. The first thing I wanted to focus on was UI design, as that is the part of the process that was the most alien. On Android you don't just say "put a button at 100x, 150y", and as it turns out, for good reason. 100x, 150y won't be in the same place on different phones, for instance. Instead you basically create layouts, which are more dynamically laid out pieces of UI that get anchored to, say, the top left corner of the screen. And then everything is laid out in relation to the parent element. Designing more complex UIs in this form was a bit of a puzzler, but I figured it out once I stopped thinging of layouts and started thinking of trees. No, not the ones with green on them. The ones you learn about in algorithms and data structures.  
 
And so. Here is my second app ever. The Munchkin Battle Counter: 
 

 Nobody tell Steve Jackson about this!
 Nobody tell Steve Jackson about this!

  
Want to give it a spin? Get it at my temporary storage site. 
 
Want to look at cats instead? OK! 
 
Both are signed (by me) and don't actually require any permissions. I need to figure out how to prevent the apps from claiming they want to look at your phone records.
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