Tuesday 10 January 2012

Quickstart your Android application development

Ever wondered what it takes to create an application that works on your Android device? Well there are two possible routes - one is to learn the tricks of the trade and second is to look out on Google and get caught in a medley of information that will do anything but confuse you more and more. You will hear words like Ant, Android SDK, FLEX, AIR, ADT etc that will frighten you in the first place.

Android is based on Java and many people will tell you that you need to know Java to be able to develop Android applications. But this is not true at all. Of course you can develop Android apps in Java and it is not the only way to develop an Android app. 

The first thing you need to know before getting involved in something new is to get to understand the underlying conceptual framework and to grasp the ABC of the thing. Once you get started in this the rest becomes quite easy. 

In this article we will look at the ABC of deploying a simple app on android device. You do not need to work on JAVA or use Java programming language. If you are familiar with Flash then this is more than enough. If you know some ActionScript then this is better. However, you need bear in mind that you need use ActionScript 3.0 for deployment on an Android device.

An Android application takes the form of an Android package with an extension (APK). An APK file is a package that can be opened with either Winzip or Winrar so that you can see what in. 

An APK file once deployed on an Android device will be recognised by the device as an Android installable application. You can install or uninstall the application in the normal way. 

Assuming you know Flash, here is what it takes to make it an Android app:
  1. Open Adobe Flash, and make your simple Flash animation. You may or may not use Actionscript 3.0 in the application depending on the complexity of your application and the knowledge of Flash that you have. 
  2. Publish your Flash file to SWF.
  3. Convert your SWF file to an APK package using either an IDE (if you have the Flash extension called Air to Android) or you can do it from the command-line if you have a packagae called the Flex SDK.
Of course this is the big picture and to really achieve this you will need some technical elements to be defined, such as creating a digitallly signed certificate to enable the application to be compiled for the Android device. 

These details will follow in forthcoming blog posts.

6 comments:

  1. Nice post. Thanks for sharing this great information.

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  2. Indeed This was a very helpful article. I would have never imagined that a SWF file could be manipulated and transformed into an APK package. Before reading this article, I only knew that when I extracted the files from an APK package, I found an XML document, which I supposed contained a lot of instructions for the application itself but I also found 3 main folders that I think I saw in most APK package that I extracted. Firstly the assets folder which contained a HTML file. Secondly the META-INF folder which I supposed contains the main files for the application and the last folder was named "res" which looks like it kept the layout,the buttons,etc... of the program. I was quite shocked when I learnt that Java was not necessary in creating an APK package. :)

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  3. I must agree with you on this. But You must realize that iphone is produced by Apple only. Whereas Android phones are manufactured by alot of companies, like HTC, Samsung, Motorolla and especially sony. With sony's latest Android phone, The Sony XPERIA S, which will be soon on the market. According to its Specification, it has a 12-megapixel camera and 1080p video recording, which is far much better than the iphone. So according to me, The Android smartphones will lead the Smartphone world for some decades unless another competitor enters.

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  4. Its very helpful for android application development,very useful for android mobile app development..Thanks for sharing!!

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  5. I totally agree with zubairtheace that Android is better than iPhone because of its functionalities like 12-megapixel camera and 1080p video recording, etc.

    ReplyDelete

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