ChristopherLowe

Well I have been working with Android for a few weeks now and I am absolutely loving it. Here are a few little tips I have discovered along the way to make life easier.

• Do not fight with Android. Everybody knows that robots are bigger and stronger than flesh and blood. If you find yourself fighting against the system you are doing something wrong.
• Do not hard code strings - use the strings.xml resource and come up with a naming convention that works for you. There is no

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Adding sound and music to your app is extremely easy. Place your sound file in a new directory res/raw.

import android.media.MediaPlayer;

and then where you want the music to play:

MediaPlayer myMusic = MediaPlayer.create(this, R.raw.splashsound);
myMusic.start();

where splashsound is the sound file's name without the extension.

That's it!

Well I have had a frustrating few hours working out how to add buttons dynamically. Here is how I did it. Firstly, you need to give the layout an ID in the xml file.

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:id="@+id/buttonlayout"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:orientation="vertical" >

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Introductions
Hi! My name is Chris and I love to program. This is the first of what I hope will be many blog entries on Android development. At times, the content may appear scattered like I have A.D.D. or something. That is because I will be adding things as I work; links, snippets, etc (who am I kidding, I just smoke too much pot). This is not a tutorial, I will not hold your hand and lead you towards enlightenment. Think of this more like breadcrumbs I leave along the path to becoming ...