"Android App Development"

BayChi (ACM special interest group on computer-human interaction)

Xerox Parc, 9 Aug 2011

Marko Gargenta, from Marakana

Marko would be a good adjunct, he wrote the book "Learning Android"

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Android-Marko-Gargenta/dp/1449390501/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313280539&sr=1-1

1. Building blocks of an Android app:

Activities : an activity is roughly a screen, managed by the system, system calls your callbacks, developer can't kill an activity, similar to an Applet.

Services: run in the background, have no UI

A music app would have an activity for UI and a service to play the music.

Broadcast Receivers: publish/subscribe mechanism, can subscribe to events on the phone like battery life or network strength

Content Providers: way to share content with other apps

Built in content provider is contacts, media store, settings. Could be database or cloud based

Intents: like events or messages. Open another app

Eg. following a link in a gmail message that opens browser

Application: holds everything together

System Services: you can tap into it, like location, wifi, but they are expensive with battery

2. Ancillary Information From the Lecture

CTS: compatibility testing service

Tablets don't have hard buttons but phones do.

byte code gets compiled to dalvik code and it is the dalvik VM that runs your app.

He used omnidazzle to draw on the screen during presentation.

http://mrkn.co/f/393. For slides and code