Posts Tagged music
Developing Applications for Android
Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Android on 14/06/2010
As promised, I started looking at the Android development platform and, I must say, I am quite surprised by the results.
First, Android uses the Java programming language as language of choice, combined with a Google made class library. In this respect, my learning curve was much shorter than it was with Objective-C and Cocoa. I had to install and get used to Eclipse, but I could work over that too 🙂 (although there is an Android plugin for NetBeans too)
Secondly, once we get over the basic application programming principle and life cycle, I am surprised how quickly I was able to assemble something and how few lines of code were required.
| I decided to port my Maxi80 iPhone application to Android.
I was pleasantly surprised that the Android MediaPlayer class is able to read ShoutCast stream, out of the box, starting with Android 2.2. I decided to take the quick an easy way : let Android connect and decode the stream and piggy-back maxi80.com‘s web site to get the song cover and title. Unlike iPhone OS, Android let you run applications on the background, allowing you to enjoy the music while using your phone for other tasks. (I will update the iPhone application – as soon as iOS 4 will be released – to provide similar behavior for iPhone users) The result is surprisingly compact : about 200 lines of code. Half of them to manage the player and the other half for the (simple) user interface. As usual, the source code is available under a GPL v2 license at Kenai.com Should you own an Android 2.2 device, the application is available on the Android Market. |
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