Installing the Android SDK on Windows and saying Hello to the Android world

Having owned an Android device for more than a year I never found the time (and motivation) to start developing for the Android plattform. With holidays ahead I thought I finally might find the time and with some ideas in the head motivation wasn’t far. So here are my experiences of installing the Android SDK and getting to run the traditional “Hello World” application:

Basically I followed the steps on the Android Developers page “Installing the SDK”, which for me meant:

  1. Install the Eclipse IDE. I chose the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers in its newest “Indigo” version.
    (Since I’m a Java Developer I had Eclipse already installed albeit an older version which was already cluttered with plugins and whatnot. I chose to do a fresh install with the latest version of the Eclipse IDE)
  2. Get and install the Android SDK
    When the installation was done it gave me options to install additional packages. This is step 4 on the Android Developers page linked to above and I installed the packages for my particular Android device (version 2.2), the USB driver, the documentation and the Android SDK Tools
  3. Install the ADT plugin
    Unfortunately this didn’t work, since some required org.maven.ide.eclipse plugin could not be found. I searched the web and found I’m not the only one: it worked when I started Eclipse as an administrator (this is Windows Vista)

Having installed a clean Eclipse IDE and the Android SDK I worked my way through the “Hello, World” tutorial.
However, when trying to run the Hello-World-Application I received the following error in the Eclipse console:

[2011-07-19 20:07:18 – Emulator] invalid command-line parameter: Files.
[2011-07-19 20:07:18 – Emulator] Hint: use ‘@foo’ to launch a virtual device named ‘foo’.
[2011-07-19 20:07:18 – Emulator] please use -help for more information

Luckily someone else had already figured out the solution and it worked for me too: hint, if you don’t know the 8.3 filename of your program files folder you can open a good old command prompt console and find it out using “dir /x”.

And it worked indeed:
Hello Android: screenshot of the android virtual device

Conclusion: If you are able to find your way out of some Windows quirks setting up the Android SDK is quite simple. Luckily the solutions to the two problems above were easy to find if you entered the correct search queries and not only skimmed the resulting pages but read them more thoroughly. Actually what took most time was installing the packages of the Android SDK and writing this blog entry here in parallel.
Looking forward to some Android programming!

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