New To Making Android Apps, Where To Start!

I recently downloaded the Android SDK along with Eclipse and all the other necessary plugins needed to make Android Apps.Yet it's all too confusing. For starters there seems to be no way of knowing how to open the project from the harddrive. Only way to open up any project is by opening Eclipse and goto your recent project from there. Also if you accidently close out your form, I have no way of getting it back up. Not to mention the Getting Started thing was lacking too many details. I managed to pop up the Android Virtual Device and have an Emulator going, but don't know how to get a simple hello world app to play in there. Also I have no clue how to simply change the text in the textbox or textview, whatever its called. I was wondering if theres a better step by step tutorial on how to use the Eclipse and start creating apps right away, not to mention Java programming? I know vb6, vb.net, c# and c++, but java is something new I wanna tackle as soon as I figure out this confusing IDE beast. Thanks in advance.

I'd suggest just getting a Java app period to start... I've been working through the tutorial at Sun using the NetBeans IDE... so far it's been fairly intuitive, bot the Java and the IDE... just don't skip any steps like I did... Java is very temperamental in naming and capitalization... The only thing I don't like is that it's aimed at the complete noob to development... which means I want to skip ahead to the good stuff... and that's how I end up missing important little tidbits.

That said, my end goal is about the same, to develop Android apps... I'm hoping that somewhere someone has a decent Android development tutorial out there...

I plan to start here, when the time comes...
http://developer.android.com/develop/index.html
http://developer.android.com/trainin...app/index.html

-tg

I'm wondering how hard it would be to learn it myself? I completed my diploma of Software Development last year although, mine was the old module that didn't have mobile development for Java or C# included in the course.

I managed to figure out a few things on my own, and it turns out you need to learn both java and xml to make an app since it uses both at the same time. A lot of things are still unclear though. Like declaring integers. Why is it that on the main activity you can use int while on another activity you have to use Integer. Weird o.o

[EDIT] If you accidently close out all the windows only to find you can't find your forms no more, goto your Package Explorer on the left side of the window and goto res > layout > ...your activity here.xml then right click it and click on Android Common XML Editor. Its cryptic stuff like that, that make me very mad, and there was no menu option nor a Google solution to even find that. Just stuff you find on your own messing around.

Java: int versus Integer may be helpful.

Also:

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Opening an existing project in Eclipse is not as straightforward as in Visual Studio. Eclipse treats a folder as a project, and there is no project file as far as it is concerned unlike Visual Studio. So one can't click on a project file in Explorer to open all the files that are located inside a project.

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An alternative to Eclipse is IntelliJ IDEA, and there is a free "community edition" that supports Android development (along with the Android SDK of course). No idea (sorry) how it compares, I haven't tried it yet.


You might also consider the video tutorial series Android Bootcamp Series 2012.


There are also Basic4android (somewhere between VB6 & VB.Net, free demo available) and RFO BASIC! (QBasic-like interpreted Basic, programmed on an Android device or Android-x86 VM or Android-x86 PC).

Thanks I'll look into that. Not sure about Basic though, but its awesome that it even exists.