Defining a few android terms

We have to understand a few terms before continuing with android tutorials and for the good  part these are simple terms as used in android.

Activity	Activity is the presenter of a single screen in the application. It has certain abilities, like displaying views, menus, alerts and notifications. It can also call another Activity, which means opening a new screen. Activity is a class that derives from an android.app.Activity. An application needs to have at least one Activity. All Activities must be declared in the manifest file.
View	A view is a single user interface element. It handles user events and draws the component on the screen. Views can contain other Views, these are called view groups. A View is a class that derives from android.view.View. There are already many existing views. The developer can use them or create his own customized view by extending any of them.
Intent	Intent is the negotiator between two activities or between two applications. It gives the ability to pass messages and data between the two entities. When writing applications for mobile, Intent gives access to OS services like opening the camera, a browser, displaying notifications and so on.
Service	A Service is an application that has the ability to run in the background without displaying any user interface. A Service is a class that derives from android.app.Service. All Services must be declared in the manifest file.

FIRST ANDROID PROGRAM ( HELLO - - WORLD )

Thank you for following our tutorials and always remember to leave your comment after the series, if you have not configured your  JDK visit http://mixtratechnologies.blogspot.com/2015/01/setting-up-windows-machine-jdk.html

We will be concentrating on creating the first android tutorial for dummies.

Click file and create a new android project as shown below

 Fill in the Application Name, Project Name, Package Name and select the Minimum Required SDK and the Target SDK  by choosing in the dropdown list as shown below

Fill in the fields as shown on the screen shot above.

Click on Next  button,  and  now the other important setting we need to set up before we can launch our project is setting up the launcher icon but normally if you will not set up the launcher icon the default android icon will always occur, but now I want us to set on our own icon rather than the default icon. See the screenshot below 

Navigate through the foreground buttons which are Image, Clipart and Text. For our case we will be using Text  and we set our Text to hello. We can change the font, crop the image, add shape to our text and change the Background and the Foreground colors depending on your choice.

Click Next and create the MainActivity.java and the activity_main.xml  as shown in the screen shot below.

 

 The MainActivity represents the Activity Name and activity_main represents the Layout Name. Now click finish.

This is how the android project would be like so that you cannot  have some difficult time tracing the folders. The MainActivity is in the src folder and the activity_main is in the Layout folder, as shown below

 On your IDE menu click project, then clean the project after that you are good to run your first android program

Leave your comment as always .

Setting up windows machine jdk environment

Hello and welcome to your first android development  project. This tutorial will take you through the whole process of  setting up your first android project.

Make sure that that you have  an installed  version of  JDK  on your computer.

Follow the following link to download and install Jdk 

 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk6-jsp-136632.html

After installing Jdk ,

1.     Open Control Panel

2.     Go to System and Security

3.     Go to System

4.     On the left open Advanced system settings

5.     Go to advanced and open Environmental Variables

6.     Give the variable  name as path and the variable value as

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_18\bin

Now the JDK have been installed on your computer  but you can confirm that.

And to check if you have installed Jdk on your computer  run the CMD as an administrator and type in java and the following is displayed on the CMD

Now you have Jdk installed on your windows machine.

Download and install Eclipse from  http://eclipse.org .

In the next tutorial I will be showing you how to set up your first android project.