Late Night PC

I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I've been doing to have a look at Google's new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on. I saw QEMU source, SDL source and they distribute the source for the Linux kernel that they're running.

The installation instructions worked fine for me on my Linux box, running OpenSuse 10.3 and Eclipse 3.2 that I installed via Yast. I ran in to one hiccup, when I first installed the ADT Eclipse Plug-in the extra options for it didn't show up in the Preferences Dialog where they should. I had to check a couple times to make sure that I had installed it correctly but it showed up where it should in Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration.

I started looking at the other options for building projects then realized that I didn't have an Ant view in my Eclipse. So I went looking for where that comes from and I decided I needed to install the JDT Plug-in via Yast. Most Eclipse users probably already have the Java Development Tools (JDT), I think it's part of most installations, but I haven't been using Eclipse on this machine yet. After that I had the Ant view and the Android plug-in showed all the options it should. I set the SDK location and was able to create Android projects just like the directions describe.

It's easy to get excited looking at this SDK. I tried out a couple of samples in the emulator. The connection to Google Maps is pretty impressive. I also see configuration options for XMPP. I'll have to see if I can talk to a Jabber server on my machine and do something interesting. Maybe I could try a little Java game, I've done some SDL. It's hard to choose what direction to go in but I feel like it'd be a shame not to build something of my own with all this great code to start from.