Installation

We are starting to work on Android Studio, the official IDE for Android application development, based on IntelliJ IDEA.

You will need to install and setup Android Studio on your laptop in order to complete any of the technical units.

To do so, follow the instructions on the Android developer site.

If you would like a step-by-step tutorial on setting up Android Studio, Udacity offers a free course with helpful videos.

If you own an Android device, be sure to try connecting your device to Android Studio and running the Hello World app on your phone. This may require you to enable "Developer mode" on your phone.

As you start running applications on your phone you will need a way to get information about what your app is doing, particularly as you start debugging issues in your code. In Java, you would do this with calls to System.out.println() but that does not produce the desired result in an Android app. Instead, you will use the logging module as described in this tutorial.

If you run into unexpected error messages over the course of the preparation or workshop, don't hesitate to use Google to search for solutions to your problem. StackOverflow and other online communities contain many useful resources that can help you debug issues that you might encounter with Android Studio and the Android SDK.