So I have been having some real fun with setting up my PC for Android development this week. It all began very well, with Google’s quick start SDK package – all with the Eclipse IDE included!

I have only used two IDE’s in my programming career – Netbeans and Visual Studio and since VS2013 came out, I have never looked back. Of course, I have yet to use Eclipse extensively but it has yet to titillate my IDE taste buds. Thus far, I have found the UI to be a little clunky; and set up to be rather instusive on development. I have persevered, and have finally got into a position where I can at least start development.

I’ve done some very basic class structuring, and had a play around with getting a map into an app. The latter of these two jobs has proven to be quite the ordeal, and has set me back more than I was expecting. Creating and building a map system is totally out of the scope of the project, so I have made sensible use of Google Maps. This where I ran into problems; the main being that I do not have a physical Android device to hand, all my development needs to be done in an emulator at this stage. The lesser problem was the rather complex procedure of attaining an API key to allow the application to access Google map data.

The biggest issue has been trying to successfully install Google Play onto an emulator and get a maps application to run. To test this, obtained the google API demo, you can read a full guide on how I ended setting it all up here.