I found this great site where you can create your own charts based on the data held against smartphone usage. So I tried it out and have got some expected and some surprising results. Read More...

Tags: Smartphones

As I have been trying to learn Android Development but with no previous programming experience it has become quite a struggle. I tried following guides on the internet but they weren’t making much sense to me as they weren’t covering the simple basics.

Mark, my employer gave me an Android For Beginners development guide which was much easier to follow. However the guide didn't cover the different ways you can achieve the same results.

For example, following the guide, I was writing code in the main.xml to create buttons . . .

<Button android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:text="Button"
android:id="@+id/button1"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
></Button>
<Button
android:id="@+id/button2"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:text="Button" android:layout_height="wrap_content"
></Button>
<Button
android:id="@+id/button3"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="Button" ></Button>


. . which took a lot of time. Then Mark showed me how I could just easily drag and drop the actual button in the graphical layout.




I Understand the guide was trying to return to absolute basics, in order to explain what the coding means. However not showing any alternative ways to do something so critical to app development was not very helpful.

It just shows you can’t beat having an expert on hand to help you along the way!

Tags: Starting development