Last week I attended Big Nerd Ranch’s Android bootcamp. Wow! What an awesome week! So, I was only marginally familiar with the Andoird SDK before I attended the bootcamp. These are the kinds of things I knew before going to class…

1. Adb logcat is a command that opens the log of what’s really going on under the hood. Adb stands for android debug bridge. Typing adb logcat at a terminal/command prompt while the emulator is running provides you with a very useful console log.
2. Screen layouts are controlled by xml, an android specific xml format.
3. Resources classes are compiled from the layout, strings and other xml files in res folder and can be referenced in code by R.layout.name_of_layout_xml. These resources can make little red x’s in Eclipse show up even when there isn’t a real problem with your code because you just need to clean/build.
4. Apps aren’t deployed as wars or jars. They are deployed in an apk.
5. The activity lifecycle includes a number of methods that you can override, including onCreate and onPause.
6. I had done some tutorials, bought some books, and looked over several of sites I had also asked for help, but nothing really got the concepts in my head like the training at the Big Nerd Ranch.

We covered a ton of stuff over the course of the week: Layouts—lists, spinners, radio buttons, Activities (multiple activities), Menus, Saving to Database, Notifications, Toasts, Video, Webkit, Location, Intents, Content Providers, AIDLs, Services, Dailing a number, Maps… (there were more topics, but these are the ones that really stood out).

There were modules on each of these topics complete with code examples and exercises, which has really been helping out now that I am back at home writing Android apps as fast as my little fingers can type.

The time our class spent together eating meals was incredibly instructive—as folks drilled our instructor with Android-related questions. :) Here are some of my notes from class. After the course, I am re-writing the Android Sheep app and am working on my own “to do” list app—original, huh.

A Short Post about Adele Goldberg for Ada Lovelace Day 2009

Do you remember the scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley where the team at Xerox PARC must give Steve Jobs a tour of their ground-breaking research? A red-headed woman very reluctantly shows Steve the team’s then bleeding-edge work. Take a minute to watch the clip, if you haven’t seen it (beginning around frame 3.14).

This scene is very loosely based on actual events¹, and the woman portrayed can refer to none other than Adele Goldberg.

Dr. Goldberg was one of the researchers responsible for the advancement of object-oriented programming concepts and for the development of the Smalltalk language. Smalltalk, the first fully object-oriented language, was used to prototype the features that we associate with modern GUIs—graphical menus, mouse clicks, browsers and windows. The end result of the PARC team’s research was enabling users with little technical knowledge to make simple changes on a microcomputer, such as changing directories, opening files and pasting text.

The research Goldberg and company were conducting wasn’t only making computing more friendly for users; it was also making computing more usable for programmers. At ParcPlace, which she founded, she helped develop tools for corporate customers who want to use OO concepts in their development.

Adele was president of the ACM from 1984 to 1986. Currently, she is the founder of Neometron, Inc.

References

1. http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adele_Goldberg_(computer_scientist)
3. http://www.ddj.com/184405043

You can hear Adele talk about browsing, selecting text with a mouse and other innovations in computing in this video.