Deciding What to Program

So how does one go about deciding on what they want to make for a program? It all comes down to your background. Good at graphic design? Try your hand at making a game. Good with coding? A program that can serve as a useful tool would be your best route. Since my drawing skills are on par with a monkey (though I can make a mean stick figure) I figured my best course of action would be to make a useful tool for the phone.

Therein lies the problem. With so many apps and whatnot available on the market, what do you do? Rack your brain trying to figure out a new, innovative idea or do you put your own brand of style into a program that already exists in some form?

Let's face it, there are many, many variations of the same application in the Android Marketplace. Why just search for the keyword "weather" on the marketplace and it spits back about 2,000 results. They all mostly do the same thing but it's up to the developer to make them unique. Some give you live radar, some give you a detailed description of the allergens in the air, and others keep it simple by just displaying the temperature at your given location. It all depends on what you are in the mood for. You try out a few of the applications and from there you decide what you like best whether it's the functionality of the program or maybe one program looks and performs better on your phone than others.

That's what I will be doing for my first program. Nothing too fancy but adding my own style to it to differentiate from the other applications on the market.

Stay tuned....

Beginning Development for Android

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog.
To start off simply, this blog is designed to express my desire in programming for Android and web page development. The main purpose is to serve as a venue to showcase my programs I have developed for Android OS.

I always wanted to design programs and tools for phones but I was unsure of where to begin.
iOS is nice but I don't have a Mac in order to program for the platform.
Windows Phone 7 was another viable choice but I was lacking in a phone running the OS. I am aware that Visual Studios can run a emulator for WP7 but an emulator can only go so far. I felt the only way to properly test any application built would be to have an actual device to test on.

What got me interested in Android was my current phone, the HTC HD2. Obviously this phone does not run Android natively, it ships with Windows Mobile 6.5 which is not the greatest phone OS out there.
After snooping around on the XDA developer's forum, I took notice that many people were able to get Android running just fine on their HD2s.
So I took a shot at it and loaded the Cyanogen Android mod onto my SD card. After a bit of frustration and a wiped contacts list later, I was up and running with a fully functioning Android OS on my HD2.
This of course gives me a viable device on which to test Android developed programs.

I plan on starting small. Developing programs I can put on the market for free to get my name out there.
From there I will see where things go whether I want to keep pursuing this or to move on to different ideas.