Creating AVD's

As promised I am updating you on things I learned during my initial setup of the Android environment.

So the first time around I was following the Google documentation and created an AVD using the terminal and while I appreciate the power of command lines, I am a sucker for GUI's.  Thankfully I have discovered that you can create and manage AVD's inside of Eclipse by going to: Window -> Android SDK and AVD Manager.

Once you are in the Android SDK and AVD Manager, click Virtual Devices on the left hand side and then the New button on the far right to create a new AVD.

NOTE: When attempting to create a new AVD, if you are expecting to see available Targets but don't, it means you have not yet installed the SDK Platform Packages.  To do this, select the Available Packages on the left and then check the top level node in the window on the right to get all the available packages and then select Install Selected.

To make sure I'm covered with testing, I went ahead and created AVD's for each target (ex: Android2.1, Android1.6, ...) with a 64MB SD Card on them.

Kickoff!

I am putting in writing my desire to learn everything I can about mobile software development and share with you what I learn along the way.  I figure the best way to follow through with my own personal growth and development goals is to declare it to the public and make a promise to share what I have learned.

To share a little background, in my day job I am part of a team developing a mobile field service product in C# on the .NET and .NET Compact frameworks.  The scope of this blog may touch on that work a bit but will mainly be focused on my extracurricular activities in learning to develop for other mobile platforms like Android and iPhone.

My first substantial project will be to create an application for the Android 2.1 platform.  Since I will also like to have the side effect of being able to sell - and hopefully profit from - some of these efforts, I may have to withhold any details that may diminish my competitive advantage in the market.   I expect that these details will be specific to the domain of the application I am building and not necessarily related to the technical details of developing for the Android platform.

As I write this I am realizing that in setting up the development environment and creating my first Hello World app for Android, I did encounter some things that weren't entirely obvious following the Android documentation.  So, in my next post I will detail what is required to get your first Android environment up and running.

Stay tuned...