Assistance with Young Scientist Android App.

tophat

Hello all,
My son & I are developing an Android app for the Young Scientist which is fast approaching. We'll be sticking to one tablet platform and Android 2.2
Perhaps our enthusiasm trumped our (in-)experience and we're struggling a fair bit.
Any one out there able to give us a hand ? Even if we could pick your brain to ensure it's structured right would be appreciated.

Atomic Pineapple

A bit more information on what your trying to do and the problems your hitting would be useful.

tophat

It's an app to collect data (manually) on an energy crop store, in a SQLite database for retrival, analysis and presentation. After that there are other features could be included (GPS for location finding and camera for photo records) but we may leave them out till Rev.2 !!
To the second part of your question: where do I begin !!

LetsThinkBIG

Hi.
What set up are you running to create this app?
I develop Apple iOS apps, and require the developer pack ($99 p/year) and a mac platform (i bought a mac mini €600).

If its relatively easy I'll consider helping you out for nothing more than my learning.

Ps. Young scientist rules !

Sheeps

You begin here by asking the community for support. Maybe if you could give us a bit of info on your technical background we can more acuratly point you in the right direction. When I started developing for Android, I had been programming for about 4 or 5 years including java development with J2ME and J2SE so I was able to learn the Android SDK in a matter of days.

If you have no experience programming I'd suggest getting a programmer on board, if you have a bit of programming experience and are familiar with oop concepts I'd pick up a book on java, then when you're familiar with that pick up a book on android and start reading. There's a lot of sample code around on the net, but to understand the sample code you need to know java and more so OOP.

The project sounds simple enough and I'm currently working on something similar for graphing information about driving economy so if you need someone to help you out with coding or how you would go about designing an app I'd be more than happy to help you out.

Timmaay

As the previous posters said, how much experience yous have already will have a big effect in what route yous should take, if its zero computer programming then you are definitely going to need help! If you don't have experience with Java, (which I didn't before I started to mess with Android apps), then I would personally recommend you use this software program Basic4Android. The interface is in my view much much easier then Eclipse with the main program that Java android developers use, you can get a proper working app made much much quicker, it has most of the functionality of Java based apps (SQL/GPS etc are all no problems with it). All the coding is done through Visual Basic, which I knew myself beforehand, so that was abig advantage to me!

The tutorials that have been made are very very useful and much better then any of the Eclipse tutorials that I tried. The program costs $99 but you can use it for free for the 1st month before you have to register and pay that. There also is a very active developers forum, who will reply to you quickly with any problems you have.

And just before someone asked, No I've nothing to do with them, just in my case, after wasting 2/3weeks trying to install Java and Eclipse and get very basic tutorials done, I gave up, and found B4A and found it far more user friendly.

dangerousdavem

How come you and your son are doing a project for the Young Scientist Exhibition? I didnt realise there was a father/son category. Its called the YOUNG scientist for a reason