I’ve been a fan of Google’s mobile operating system Android for quite a while – technically since I heard about it 2 years ago. I’ve been unfortunate to live in Canada, because none of the telco companies here have carried any phones with Android (only HTC phones for now, but Samsung seems to be coming out with something soon).

But, on June 2nd 2009 Rogers is coming out with the HTC Dream and the HTC Magic and Google Android will be here! And on June 3rd Google Android will be in my hands. [I’m not going to be a geek and get it on the very first day it comes out, come on!]

So, in expectation of this date, I started playing around with Android and developing my own applications. To start off, it’s been absolutely easy, pleasant, and a breeze to setup. It was like stealing candy from a kid. I followed the instructions from the Android – Developers website and using Eclipse as my environment I was creating mobile applications in less than 30 mins.

To get the SDK follow this link: http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r2/index.html
To read the installation instructions follow this link: http://developer.android.com/sdk/1.5_r2/installing.html
And I recommend using Eclipse if you do want to get the “30 mins effect”.

I wanted to test out the different functions/features that Android offers out of the box, so I thought of a simple app which would allow me to have a goal and thus opportunities to experiment. I am going to write a “tax” application. Unfortunately, this tax application will not fill out your taxes. It will calculate how much the government has to take from you each year. You will enter your country (Canada only for now), you will enter your income, and the result will be a summary of your take-home pay and taxes due, by province (or states for the US – eventually). I’m going to call it “The Taxman”.

I’ve just started this mini app, and as I go along I will post snippets of code that I found difficult to come up with – to help out anyone that is looking for the exact same solution. Also, I have a full-time job, so it will take me a month to complete this silly app :), so my posts might be infrequent.

This weekend I had a chance to start it off and I had trouble with a couple of things. I will write a separate post on each one over the next couple of weeks. Here’s three of those things:

1. How to switch from one screen to another (also called Activities)

2. How to switch screens with an animation effect

3. How to switch screens using a dragging motion with your finger – you know, iPhone stylez.

That’s it for now… those 3 posts will be coming out very, very soon!