Post date: 29-Jun-2009 13:49:30
While discussing volunteering as a narrator on the excellent StarShipSofa podcast, I happened to mention my enthusiasm for my new G1 and the Android platform. SSS editor Tony C. Smith is apparently also a G1 owner and we were soon throwing around ideas for a SSS-specific app - long story short, I have a new project.
After a weekend or so of hacking I have a rough mockup of the interface. I've also drawn inspiration some very handy RSS parsing code and am now exploring Android's Handler class to spin the hard work off into a separate thread. The learning curve has been steep (I'm learning a lot of Java at the same time as learning a lot of Android concepts) but Google's documentation is pretty strong and the ApiDemos package is also a great place to see this stuff in action.
Mostly it feels quite like the GTK development I've previously done (particularly for my N800) - nice background adapter classes to map from data sources to list views, etc. I was particularly impressed with 'linkify', though - it's a flag on the basic text view widget that automagically converts all URLs in the text into clickable, browser-launching links. For more control you can always break out the embedded webkit view, but for basic marked-up text (like the summary text from an RSS feed) this was awesome.
More information coming as this moves into beta - stay tuned.