An introduction to the Android platform

Here are the slides for my introductory presentation on the Android platform and some useful links to Android related sites.

Introduction to Android

This presentation is a quick introduction to the basic knowledge needed to start developing for the Android mobile platform. This general overview shows the system architecture, SDK and tools, along with some basic need-to-know classes like Activities, Intents, Views, Layouts, Services and ContentProviders.

Books

• I highly recommend a CommonsWare subscription for three books (The Busy Coder’s Guide to Android Development, The Busy Coder’s Guide to Advanced Android Development, and Android Programming Tutorials) from Mark Murphy. It is only $35/year. You can’t beat that!

Sample Code & Graphics

• apps-for-android is a set of 10 simple projects from the Android team.

• shelves is a larger application from a Google developer with examples of custom lists and animations.

• astrid is a full-featured todo list application that has been published to the Android market.

• Android GUI PSD is a Photoshop file for mocking up Android GUIs.

• Android Snippets – code snippets for common actions

• Web view of Android framework source

Tutorials

• These are all from Google I/O 2009 conference:

  • A General-purpose Caching Architecture for Offline-capable Web Applications with HTML 5 Databases or Gears

  • Android Lightning Talks

  • Coding for Life — Battery Life, That Is

  • Debugging Arts of the Ninja Masters

  • How Do I Code Thee? Let Me Count the Ways

  • Looking Beyond the Screen: Text-To-Speech and Eyes-Free Interaction on Android

  • Mastering the Android Media Framework

  • Pixel Perfect Code: How to Marry Interaction and Visual Design the Android Way

  • Supporting Multiple Devices with One Binary

  • Turbo-charge your UI: How to Make your Android UI Fast and Efficient

  • Writing Real-Time Games for Android

• Article about browsing Android source in Eclipse

Forums

• Google Groups

  • android-beginners

  • android-developers

  • android-discuss

• anddev.org

• androidcommunity.org forums

• androidforums.com

Blogs

• Google Mobile Blog or Android Developers Blog

• Android Guys

• Androinica