Regular readers will realise that I’ve been rather quiet recently. The reason is that over the last couple of weeks I’ve bitten the bullet and started seriously developing an “app” for Android. As always when I have a programming project in progress other uses of my “project” time tend to take very much a back seat, so apologies if you’ve been watching for photos or words of wisdom… 🙂

I don’t want to say too much about the application itself until I have something ready to put on the market place. Suffice to say I think I’ve spotted an odd gap in the market where the weaknesses of iOS force a number of good solutions to one problem of information management, whereas Android’s more flexible architecture ironically mean the problem goes unsolved. Watch this space.

I was initially a bit worried that the learning curve for Android development might be very steep, especially when I started working through the standard Java-based examples in the official Google development toolkit. Like all Java development that approach seems to require a vast amount of “scaffolding” code, which must be constructed with very little environmental help, to achieve very simple results. This didn’t look good.

Then, thankfully, I discovered Basic4android. This is a remarkable toolkit developed by a small group in Israel which allows the development of Android software using a powerful but very accessible language and IDE based on Visual Basic. Behind the scenes, this is compiled into standard Android Java code, so ongoing delivery of applications is standard, but the coding and design process is close to “pure VB”.

The development environment has all the features you could reasonably ask for, including code completion, syntax highlighting, background compilation and the like. Remote debugging extends to devices connected over the Internet as well as via cable or local networks, and has a cunning feature where you can “hot swap” the code behind a running application allowing a range of changes to a running test application without restarting it. These are very impressive abilities for a product from a relatively small company.

Just as with the original VB, Basic4android has a model which allows developers to supplement the platform capabilities with shareable components, libraries and code snippets, and a very active community has rapidly built a library of “donationware” which provides easy access to the majority of Android features. I’ve had to be a bit ingenious in a few cases, but even as a newbie on my first project I haven’t yet found a requirement which can’t be met with a few lines of code.

On a slightly more negative note, Basic4android doesn’t seem to provide a good solution to the problem of supporting multiple screen sizes and orientations, except by writing multiple hard-coded scripts for the various options. This problem has been solved for websites with the concept of the “responsive grid”, and it ought to be possible to arrange the UI of an Android app with similar logic (e.g. “arrange these two controls side by side with the label taking 75% of the width, unless the screen is narrower than X, in which case arrange them vertically”). If this can be done in Basic4android I haven’t yet worked out how.

Debugging on a physical device connected directly to the PC is very straightforward, but of course limited to the devices you own, and a bit clumsy if you fancy doing a spot of work when travelling. While the Android development kit includes an emulator for the PC, it runs so slowly as to be completely unusable, even on a high-spec machine like my AlienWare M17x. I may have discovered a better compromise, in Android-x86, a port of Android which runs happily in a VMWare virtual machine. Installation was easy, but there are a few foibles I haven’t yet conquered. Again, watch this space.

Overall my adventure into Android development is shaping up well. More news later.