I've spent most of this afternoon and evening working on my first Android app.

I was dissatisfied with the current slate of applications that are available for a particular problem domain, so I have decided to write my own.

More details will follow as my work approaches completion, but in the meantime I'm going to jot down some thoughts about the stuff that I worked on today.

• I haven't written a line of Java in probably seven or eight years because I think that it sucks. It wasn't difficult to get back into it, though I still don't like it.
• I hate checked exceptions; they make the compiler annoying enough to motivate you to write suppressing catch blocks just so that your code will compile (Doing so is a bad idea, of course, so suck it up and do the right thing).
• The APIs I wanted to use were not available publicly until Honeycomb. I want my app to run on Eclair. I ended up using reflection to give me the appropriate interfaces depending on availability: I use the documented API if it's available, but if I catch a NoSuchFieldException then I fall back to the undocumented APIs. I am amused that my first Android app, the one that I am writing to teach myself, is using undocumented APIs; I did the same thing when I started hacking 16-bit Windows code in 1995. It's actually a bit easier this time around because I may browse the entire source code. When I taught myself Windows I didn't have that luxury, though I always had my trusty copy of Undocumented Windows sitting nearby (I still have that book)!
• I haven't used Eclipse since the last time that I wrote code in Java. This time around, I am proud to say that I successfully resisted using Eclipse for my Android work. I was worried that command-line environments were going to be an afterthought when it came to the Android developer tools but I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. Vim and Ant FTW!
• ddms is really cool.
• Today's work passed testing! svn commit

<digression>This experience reinforces my opinion that hiring developers based on their ability to satisfy a laundry list of keywords is ridiculous. Good developers don't need a year to pick up whatever technologie du jour you're pushing. Whatever your buzzwords are, they'll probably be obsolete in five years anyway.</digression> That's another topic for another day.