So you’ve acquired an Android Dev Phone 1 (the page goes to great lengths to avoid telling you that it’s just an unlocked G1). You’ve downloaded Eclipse, installed the Android plugin, and created a “MyProject” app that says “Hello World, MyProject”.

Now what?

Well, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have heard of two (or three) new paradigms:

• Tasks correspond vaguely to the user’s idea of accomplishing something, like “sending an e-mail”, and an associated “activity stack” which is hidden from the programmer.
• Activities correspond loosely to subtasks, like “picking a contact”.
• Intents are issued by activities (like SendEmailActivity) to launch other activities (like ContactPickerActivity).

But that’s about it. UI programming is traditionally a pain, which is why I like the iPhone SDK’s InterfaceBuilder — (more…)