Mobile devices are becoming popular nowadays. Mobile devices can be a personal digital assistant, enterprise digital assistants or mobile phones. The processing power of mobile devices have greatly improved over the years that it has become more powerful than the computers of the older days. Each mobile device can already carry complex applications that the user can use for their daily activities. Applications can be as simple as a calendar, calculator or as complex as a photo editing application.
A mobile application runs on a mobile operating system or a mobile platform. The platform can be an iOS, Blackberry, Android, Symbian, or other mobile operating systems. Each platform has its own environment for application development.
Mobile application development is the process by which application software is developed for low-power handheld devices. These applications can be pre-installed on phones during manufacturing, downloaded by customers from various mobile software distribution platforms. Application software developers also have to consider a lengthy array of screen sizes, hardware specifications and configurations because of intense competition in mobile software and changes within each of the platforms. Mobile app development has been steadily growing, both in terms of revenues and jobs created.
One major platform for mobile applications is Android. Android has cornered the majority of the mobile devices market. With this, we will be using Android as our platform for our application development in this subject.
In this subject, we will be using Android as our mobile platform for our development. We will be using the following outline in covering the different topics of Mobile Application Development subject.
- Introduction
- Java Review
- XML Review
- Android Introduction
- Developing Hello World!
- Application Fundamentals
- Graphical User Interface (GUI)
- Introduction to Views
- More Views
- Localization
- Socket Programming
- Using Menus
- Communicating Activities
- Capturing Images
- More on Sockets
- Threads
We will start with this introduction to introduce the topics that we are going to include in this subject. This will followed by a short review of Java because Java is the native language of Android. XML will also have a review since we will be dealing with XML in every android application development. After all those reviews, we will proceed with the chapter that introduces the Android platform. We then proceed with our first application development using Android. We will create the ever popular Hello World!
Before we dig deeper into the details of application development, we first have to have an overview about the application fundamentals and GUI. After these, then we are now set to create views and more views in preparation of the creating more applications that will be needing these views. This will be followed by localization, socket programming, menus, communicating activities, capturing images and threads.