CS193a Android Programming

CS193a teaches basic Android programming for an audience with moderate programming experience.

Lectures and Homeworks Introduction Intent, onClick, Animation Lifecycle, state save Lists, Preferences SQLite, Lists, Menus -- db/list homework How GUIs work, custom views Monkey View, Touch Gestures, Game Animation -- view homework Advanced View Techniques, Background Tasks Pixels, Running, Notifications -- last homework Market, .apk, Certs Try our Baby Picture Fun app in the market: Baby Picture Fun (see CourseWare site for hw turn-in instructions (you may need to sign in to see the instructions)) Recent news articles related to Android and the phone/tablet space (newest first) Kindle Fire Released -- an android device from amazon. Not exactly like a regular device. Does not support the regular store. However, it's cheap ($200) as amazon figures to make the money back some other way. Cheap hardware in people's hands is neat. You need to tie it to a 1-click-shopping-enabled amazon account for the machine to work at all, so that's a bit creepy. I suspect this is sign of cheap/prolific android hardware of all sorts in the future. Flash Canceled for Mobile -- shows how open platforms such as HTML5 and to a degree Android seem to be taking over. Think how annoying it would be if, as a developer, you had invested in lots of Flash programming, and then Adobe just canceled Flash out from under you. This is one way of understanding why Android is open source .. it makes it more safe/attractive to developers. They can build on it, but not be subject to weird decisions from google. More generally various forms of "open" platforms are taking over (HTML, Javascript, Python, ...). Building your software on someone else's proprietary platform is like building your very expensive building on someone else's land, trusting them to play nice in the future. Ice Cream Sandwitch latest release, unifies phone/tablet OSs $35 Android Tablet launched in India ... the sort of thing that happens if your platform is open source (we'll see if they can really hit that price) Steve Jobs, Giant Episodes from career: (a) Jobs fosters the huge technical leap of the GUI Macintosh, but DOS beats it anyway -- Network Effect trumps product quality. (b) Jobs, with the iphone, forces the carriers away from their preferred charge-for-each-little-event paradigm. Having a less predatory attitude towards the users creates a better and more profitable ecosystem. Amazon Fire - Android that Amazon can just do this is a defacto example that Android is open source. Strategy questions for later: why is Android open source vs. the closed iphone model? How does that impact developers? Cell carriers? Texting SMS vs. TCP/IP

CourseWare site -- please add yourself to cs193a here. We'll use CourseWare for questions and discussions. Since we're just grading the homework's 0/1, it's fine for to post any sort of question or answer. The staff will be keeping a close eye on the forums to answer questions. Office Hours -Nick Parlante (nick.parlante @ cs.stanford.edu) - Thu 2:00-4:30 or by appt, Gates 189 -Madiha Mubin (mamubin @ stanford.edu) - Tue (Gates B26b) and Wed 12:00-2:30 (Gates b02 basement) Android Doc Links developer.android.com -- main developer site Installing the SDK Managing AVDs Application Fundamentals Activities Activity Lifecycle Logging Views and Layouts Animation with Views Toast Notifications Dev Tools App how to install in a real phone List View View superclass Handler class for posting runnables for the UI thread Background Services Status Notifications Publishing and Market

Lecture will go over the key ideas and examples for building Android programs, leading to a programming exercise on the same material. The exercises should not be too hard, just giving you chance to apply what you just saw. We will grade the exercises P/NC and indeed the course is graded P/NC. There was a snafu with the course in axess makes it appear that you can get a letter grade -- you cannot.

Topics -- here's a rough plan. We'll use a large, working code examples for a few weeks each to explore the related techniques.

• Getting started: SDK, tooling, debugging, the emulator
• 1. Basic Program: activities, layouts, widgets, listeners, menu commands, intents, multiple views, built-in animations, simple persistence. Understanding the activity lifecycle, performing correctly under suspend/resume. Customizing the list view.
• 2. Game/Animation Program: custom views, canvas, drawing, animation (all in Java)
• 3. Network Program: presenting data from some network source. (a) "refresh" approach, where the user manually grabs the latest. Work up to using AsyncTask for this. (b) starting a background service to work in background more reliably.

Class is Wed 3:15-4:45 in 320-105 new room! (campus-map.stanford.edu .. sorry, they don't support linking to a result. This is a case where the webapp should use GET but they use POST)

FAQs

• How much work is this class? It should not be especially hard, since Android programming is itself not that hard. I like to think this reflects progress with modern languages, tools, etc. ... Android is very modern, and it makes many common cases easy to program. We'll walk though all the common and important techniques with a series of programming exercises resulting in complete programs. The class will no doubt be more work than a 1-unit seminar, but a lot less work than a real 3 unit engineering class.
• How much programming background is required for this class? You need to be proficient with Java programming. We list CS106b as the official prerequisite, although we won't be doing any C++ (heh, see "modern" above). If you know Java and have some programming experience beyond your first course you should be ok.
• Is there a book? We'll provide online docs as we go + of course there's tons of available online Android resources. I may recommend some books for people who want supplemental materials, but I need to review the available books first.
• Is the class going to be taped? Currently the answer is no.
• Are you going to cover tablets in detail? Maybe, depending on how far we get. There's a bunch of interesting advanced topics for weeks 9-10, but it'll depend on how fast the earlier stuff goes. What is certainly true is that we will have done many examples with the core Android architecture that reading the docs for the Tablet cases will present no problem.

Licensing: this material was created by Nick Parlante in 2011. This material is released into the public domain -- it is free to be re-used in any way.