Hey .. So I’m going to TRY and port Galcon to the Android.  There’s no promises yet, but we’re going to do what we can here.  If the port isn’t working in about a week, I’ll be giving up.

Step 1 – Download the SDK:

Download the SDK – http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

Using the package manager, I got all the versions of the SDK that are NDK and OpenGLES compatible.  I think we’re talking 1.6+.

Step 2 – Download Eclipse IDE:

Download Eclipse IDE – http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

I grabbed the Eclipse Classic package since that seemed to be the best guess for doing Java / C / C++ code.  I would have opted not to bother downloading Eclipse, but all the tutorials seem to mention it, and I’ve got to start somewhere.  From what I can tell it’s what everyone uses for development.

Step 3 – Install the Android ADT plugin into Eclipse:

Install the Android ADT plugin into Eclipse:

You do this by first going into Eclipse > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites > and adding the Android one as specified in Step 1.

Then go to Eclipse > Help (???) > Install new software > Select the android source > check developer tools > next > … finish >

Step 4 – Completing the “Hello World” tutorial:

Complete the hello world tutorial.

http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/hello-world.html

I found that booting up the Android VM took ages, so be patient.  Eventually your “Hello World” app will start.  It took at least 2-3 minutes here.

Step 5 – Activating the Droid:

Now that I’ve got an app running in the VM, I want to get it running on my Droid and Nexus One.  Let’s figure out what to do now …

http://www.vogella.de/articles/Android/article.html#deployondevice – has some instructions.

Turn on “USB Debugging” on your device in the settings. Select in the settings Applications > Development, then enable USB debugging. You also need to install the driver for your mobile phone. For details please see Developing on a Device . Please note that the Android version you are developing for must be the installed version on your phone.

(in Eclipse, you can get to this option by clicking the black down arrow next to the big green Run arrow) To select your phone, select the “Run Configurations”, select “Manual” selection and select your device. (The selection of your device doesn’t actually happen until you press Run.)

And, we have lift-off!  I’ve got my first Android app running on my Droid phone!  I must say, activating this device was a delight compared to the Palm experience.  This took a few minutes to google the instructions, but the process itself took me about 30 seconds.  (Palm took all day.)  Unfortunately, I suspect this will be countered by the increased difficulty of actually doing the port.

Step 6 – Activating the Nexus One:

Unboxed the Nexus One and repeated Step 5.  No problems.  Man is development activation of these devices easy.

Tomorrow I’ll be working on getting the NDK up and running and see how far I can get with understanding the mysterious relationship between C and Java.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 6:10 pm and is filed under android, galcon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.