Ewald Za Horn

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since Aug 03, 2011
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Recent posts by Ewald Za Horn

Joel Murach wrote:To answer Ewald's question, all of the apps presented in this book work fine using the permissions available prior to Android 6.x, so I didn't add any coverage of the permissions features that became available with Android 6.0. However, I plan to add coverage of these features to the next edition of this book.



Thank you, if you target Android 6.0 (23) then these apps will fail - just watch out for that.
8 years ago

salvin francis wrote:

Maneesh Godbole wrote:
As a developer who is used to Eclipse, I personally prefer using the same tool. It is human tendency that a learning curve introduces inertia. So from existing Eclipse user's point of view, I just need to focus on learning Android concepts and not IDE concepts too.
But of course, for a beginner, it wouldn't matter.



I too found android studio quite difficult to work with. I unknowingly use a million keyboard shortcuts that I find difficult to unlearn. I found myself repeatedly making the same mistakes of pressing a bunch of keys and wondering why its not happening Although, I found Android studio is quite fast actually.



For Android development, I now prefer Android Studio - it's very good and keeping out of my way and, unlike Eclipse, is fast and responsive. I still use Eclipse for Scala development, so I sometimes press the wrong shortcut as well, but in general, I've found that investing a little bit of time and patience has made me efficient in both IDE's.
8 years ago

Joel Murach wrote:Sorry for the confusion. It looks like there was a bad link to the table of contents.

Anyhow, just to verify what you've already said, the first edition of this book used Eclipse as the IDE, and the second edition uses Android Studio. That's probably the most striking difference between the two editions.

Thanks!



That is excellent news! So my real question was around Android 6.x development. So much has changed from previous versions, especially around permissions. Is there any coverage for Android 6.x in the book, or did it come out too late to be included?
8 years ago

Karthik Shiraly wrote:

Ewald Za Horn wrote:I see from the content that the book mainly uses Eclipse for Android development.


The new 2nd edition (that's the edition being promoted on our forum right now) uses Android Studio everywhere. I'm guessing you saw the TOC of the older 1st edition.



I see! I followed the link provided and got the old TOC then. My apologies, these forums are rather confusing at times.
8 years ago
Haha! I might be an older dog than you though...

I used Eclipse, NetBeans, Visual Studio, Vi, you name it. Perhaps that's the difference, in that I've been forced to learn new things all the time.

Android Studio, in beta phase, was quite irritating, but it's settled down quite nicely.
8 years ago
That is interesting, as I've made the migration to Android Studio and have found it much more productive and less irritable than Eclipse. I was surprised to see the main focus of the book on Eclipse, that's all. It led to my question about Android 6 - there are many changes between the different platforms and I'm still curious to know if this book prepares developers for those changes. I have unfortunately spent money on quite a few books, only to be terribly disappointed at content that has been outdated for years.

I do agree that, as an existing Eclipse user, it woul be easier to learn Android alone that to have to learn Android Studio as well. The learning curve to start using Android Studio is very small in my experience, so the extra effort required is worth it for me.
8 years ago
I see from the content that the book mainly uses Eclipse for Android development. Is that not a concern as Eclipse is not the future of Android development and Android Studio has been around for so long? As an Android developer, I've been using Android Studio for so long, I can't remember what Eclipse looks like. What would be the reason for sticking to Eclipse, as I think this could be confusing, especially to Android beginners?

Also, I'd like to know if the book addresses some of the changes introduced with Android 6, for example, how permissions have changed?
8 years ago
There are some nice YouTube tutorials available for both products, it looks like a lot of tinkering is involved

Good luck!
9 years ago
Hi Karen, sure, I'd love to help.

Have you by any chance seen https://www.udemy.com/android-game-programming-tutorials yet? There's a completely free Android game programming tutorial available, it might help you with the basics as well.

I'm very curious about Android game development myself, having mostly written Android applications and just one simple game. How can I be of assistance?
9 years ago
Are you sure about the order of lines 39 and 40? You start the world and then create a new one?

world.start();
world = new GameWorld();

Shouldn't this be the other way around?
9 years ago
I've had great success in the past with http://planetside.co.uk/products/download-tg3 - Terragen is a brilliant application, it might help you along quite nicely.
9 years ago
Hi.

I can compile everything by running the following from the command prompt (example for Test2.java):

c:>javac ranch\model\Test2


To be able to RUN the file, I need to make sure Java knows where to find the classes I'm importing, in this case, the ones in the web package. You can think of packages like folders or directories.

You have the following structure:

ranch->web
ranch->model

If you are IN the ranch.web package, it has no way of figuring out where the ranch.model package is, as it's not visible at the moment. The simplest solution is to run the command in such a way that it's easy to find the folder, for example:

C:>java ranch.model.Test2

This will generate the output correctly as it makes it easy for Java to find the classes you are important relative to the current folder. An alternative would of course be to update the CLASSPATH to include your own classes.

Might I suggest you Google Java Classpath and learn how that works? Packages can be a bit confusing in the beginning, but you'll soon get the hang of it.
12 years ago