For some time our customers and visitors ask us if we have the management software for mobile devices, our answer is always the same: not yet. In another article I explained that this type of application does not sit well with this type of development, management software need many fields that are difficult to implement with screens so small, at most we could make for the greatest smartphone or tablet. These days, however, I decided to give it a try, build Calus Plus for a smartphone, and I decided to do it for Android devices because it was released a development environment not bad. Programming for Windows Phone 8 requires Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 8 and it is not ideal for testing, let alone for Apple devices, I should make an investment that I do not know if it’s worth.
In a virtual machine I installed Slackware 14, I added this to the Java development environment (JDK) and NetBeans, everything in my home folder. Then I downloaded the latest version of Android Studio and I installed also in my personal folder.
I must say that the development environment is very functional, but before it’s all right I had to fix some small problems, such as the installation of the Android Support Repository Package and the aapt command that resides in another folder (all information easily available from the network). After fixing everything, programming with Android Studio is extremely simple because the development environment is very advanced, it also contains something like Intellisense.
The programming of applications for Android is very easy for a programmer that has the Java language in his educational background, there are the classic layout, controls, event handling with Listeners, in short, a Java programming for small screens. At the base of the Android application, however, we have something else: Activity and Intent. The first one is a class that is the basis of a screen, in fact allows to construct the window and make it interact with the user, while the second element is used to perform actions, such as launching the same Activities. We’ll see how to this SDK works in future articles, when I hope to have solved in the simplest possible way, the problem of the screen size and data management, although I must say that I already have some ideas.