Threaded's Eclectic Blog

If your screen resolution is not very high, you'll have problems with the Android Emulator. Needs a 768 pixel depth minimum. So you're out of luck with the standard setting on an eee PC, for example. Luckily there is a -scale setting for the emulator, which can vary between 0.1 and 3, so a value of around 0.6 makes the Android Emulator fit to a 600 pixel depth screen.

The Android Emulator can take a fair time to start up, up to 20 minutes on a PC, (but usually only 10 seconds or so on a mac pro,) so give it a minute or so with A N D R O I D displayed before you give up and look at what might be wrong. (It'll generally tell you on the command line if there really is something wrong, and that you're not being a tad hasty to kill the process.)

On really slow PCs you may get a message
Sorry!
Application Messaging (in
process com.android.mms) is
not responding.


Which means, if you get it frequently, your machine is way too slow: you might like to try and install Linux or go out and buy something faster like a Mac.

Labels: google android

Some clues to getting started with Google Android development.

Download the Android SDK and get the emulator to work.
Android SDK: http://code.google.com/android/download_list.html

When you've unpacked it and tried to run the emulator you'll maybe get some failure mentioning -datadir.

I generally open up a terminal and create the directory it wants.

mkdir .android
cd .android/
mkdir SDK-1.0

or you could just put it on the command line

emulator -datadir ~/temp

Then you want the Eclipse IDE:

Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (i.e. the 163 mb one)

Fire up Eclipse and now install the Android Development Tools.

In Eclipse:
Help
Software Updates...
Available Software
Add Site...

https://dl-ssl.google.com/android/eclipse/

etc. etc.

I think it's best to restart Eclipse when you get to the end.

And there you have it, a Google Android development environment.

Labels: google android