It’s been a while since I’ve done any Android development, so I decided to dust off Eclipse and see how much has changed since I last developed an Android app. After updating all the different packages, I decide to take baby steps and walk through the Hello World Tutorial and of course, things are already outdated. I walk through the steps and try to run the app on my phone and I get:
AndroidManifest.xml file missing!
And then I look over in my project view and guess what I see, a file called AndroidManifest.xml.
So, um, either I’m seeing things, Eclipse is being annoying (which does happen often from what I remember) or I missed a step/something wasn’t documented. Of course, Google is your friend and I eventually find a post that reminds me I need to build the project before running it. I go to Project -> Build Project and the project build.
Yay, that worked… but not so fast, the console says it was deployed to my phone but I don’t see anything on my phone. Long story short… according to the tutorial, a default activity should have defined and should be wired to run. Not seeing a default activity… so what’s the solution to this problem? I gave up… for a few minutes… then I decided to search around and found the Android Studio IDE and decided to give it a try. It’s based on IntelliJ, so I figured I might as well give something else a try since Eclipse was not being very friendly (or fast). The download took a while, but once I got it installed, I got my Hello World app running on my phone within a few minutes. I consider this a success, so I’m ending things here for now. I’ll do another post once I actually build something.