Android Explorations

Today I bought an Android powered tablet, the Acer Iconia 7" tablet. As my friends keep telling me, I should start doing Android development, so that I can port the little crane that could to Android devices. Apart from the horrible colours and contrast of the display, I am satisfied with the device so far. Graphics performance seems way behind what an iPad2 can do though, so graphics optimizations are going to be important. Here are some things I learned about Android programming so far:

• You need to install an SDK and an NDK.
  
• As of recently, you can do native development in C without writing a single line of Java code. To do this, see the NativeActivity sample from the NDK.
  
• You can do development from the command line without IDE's.
  
• Instead of make, you need to use ant.
  
• GLESv1_CM is the OpenGL ES1 library to use. CM stands for COMMON and means that it uses floating point, not fixed point.
  
• Doing 'ant debug' and 'ant installd' is often not enough, as I need to do a clean before building. Are the dependencies not set up properly in the sample projects?
  
• The emulator cannot do OpenGL ES2, only ES1. When doing ES1 it is super slow, even on a modern mac.
  
• The equivalent of GLX for Android is called EGL
  

I am using The Android NDK Beginner's Guide as reference, as well as a guide by IIvan Vučica. That last one is pretty ambitious: it sets up the development environment so that you can do Objective C for Android. However, I decided to keep it simple, and do my project in C.