NLP, update 2

First, this cable isn't a data cable. It just charges. Which I guess is ok, but annoying.



My app does something!

Just a text box, that then displays the text.



Wait, this isn't right. Crap.



Oops. Very important step.



All better now.



This was actually the end of the first tutorial by Google and it was pretty good. It assumed you knew nothing, explain each step like I was a child, and then showed me what the code should look like when its done. It was a good start. The next tutorial however, was nothing I was interested in. Actually the next two.



I guess it is important to understand about the lifecycle of the app, but I don't know how to do any of the processes that would even require any of that. I learned how to make a text box and a button. None of this matters for me right now. So that tutorial kind of fizzled out for me and I'm a little stuck right now.

So I starting playing around. I originally started with the Android SDK, which is basically Eclipse with the Android plugins all in one nice package. But El Goog released a new IDE called Android Studio, which to my eye is basically the same thing, but its not built on Java, so the interface is much, much faster.


Scratch

I also took a look at the MIT App Inventor. It was neat, the setup was a little different and maybe easier. Probably easier on Windows but I didn't find the setup on the Mac particularly difficult. It uses the same type of puzzle-piece snap-together programming that Scratch uses, but I haven't learned how to do that yet. Scratch was also developed at MIT, and its the programming language that is features on the Raspberry Pi. It doesn't really interest me at this point.

My next step is tough. I need to find something that's at my level. And that level is being new to Android and being new to Java. I don't know right now which one is tripping me up the most. XDA has a tutorial that I'm going to look at next. There's also one on linux.com that is multiple parts that might be helpful as well.

Its funny how when I was learning how to program in Python last summer I felt really challenged, but really successful using Udacity. I keep looking for something like that. I want an actual curriculum that is thought-out from start to finish to follow, because I don't know the ins-and-outs of Android yet. Udacity released a class on Java Programming which is looking very tempting to do. I bet I could get it done before school starts on August 14.