Week 1

Lecture dates: March 27th and 29th

The first week of lecture is all about getting to know your classmates and finding out how much they know about mobile development (Android, iOS), programming experience, and perhaps why they have decided to take this course.

The first week is also the perfect time to ensure your development machine has all the necessary software and hardware configurations that are needed.

Prerequisites

Android Studio version 3.0 or above.

We will be using Kotlin as our programming language in this course. In order to write using Kotlin, your version of Android Studio needs to be 3.0 or above.

You can use the Mac machines in any Informatics classrooms, but these machines have Android Studio installed with a version that is currently below 3.0. So each time you launch Android Studio, you'll need to update the software and restart Android Studio.

We recommend you work on your homework assignments and various projects on your laptop.

Android 4.0 (KitKat SDK)

There are numerous versions of Android SDK you can download and based your application on. However, for this course, we will target KitKat as our base SDK level. This essentially means our application can run on devices running KitKat or above.

Emulator

Android Studio has a built-in emulator that you can use to test our your application. It's useful for working on smaller projects that does not require lots of testing and interaction. That means the built-in emulator (which is free) is a recommended choice for beginners.

If you want to go big and be more professional, try Genymotion.

Genymotion is designed for developers. You can test your apps on a wide range of devices without needing to have them physically. As a student, you can try Genymotion for free by downloading the Personal Edition.

If you like to test on a physical device but still have the screen be displayed on your computer, I suggest you take a look at Vysor. Basically, Vysor displays whatever's on your phone on your desktop and allows you to also use your keyboard and mouse to interact with your phone too.

For alternatives, read this link.

Connecting Your Physical Devices to Android Studio

Nowadays, your machine is equipped with drivers that can easily detect mobile devices. However, it takes a few additional steps in order to ensure your physical device can be used to debug your application.

• Enable USB debugging on your device.

• If you're on Windows, install a USB driver for Android Debug Bridge (adb).

• For Mac users, there's no need to configure/setup anything.

Once you get those steps out of the way, plug your device over USB. Fire up Android Studio, and click Run to build and run your app on your device.

In the next couple of weeks, you'll also learn how to use adb to programmatically tell Android what to do with your device, such as run "something".