When we started this WKDU app a few weeks ago we set two goals for ourselves: The first was to have a functioning and properly aligned Play button by Thanksgiving, and the second was to have a beta version of the app done by New Years. Thanksgiving is in 3 days and as of this morning I had an off-centered “Play” button that does nothing.
Looking into the actual code needed to play a streaming station, I managed to get that part working in less than an hour. Hey, that’s like 50% of the app right there, right? Using a simple MediaPlayer object you can set up a stream in like, 10 lines of code. The layout on the other-hand is proving to be the most difficult part of Android programming in general. The whole idea of using different views and layouts, all configured in XML is a lot more like web design than I thought it would be. It seems like if you use the mentality that the XML is a CSS/HTML file, and all your code is basically Javascript that can interact with it — well then it makes more sense.
I don’t know, tonight will be spent reading and watching a bunch more Tutorials on layouts.