I took a deep breath and jumped in. You know what, the water is fine.
I finally made the small jump into Android development. Although, I am just hacking about, I am determine to build something useful. Firstly, useful for me as the first customer, and the useful for anyone else.
The stimulus for getting started in the Android development is the release of the SDK from Google that is easy to install and to get started upon. The one thing that really threw me off to get started on development on the Android platform getting the development environment working correctly.
I have always had a low budget x86 PC as my home computer, and this is what I was going to use as my development machine at home. To get the Android development working nicely on this was a nightmare. I recently bit the bullet and got a Mac Mini with a Intel I7 core. Even with this modest setup, it proved to be the silver bullet for me to get started. The nicely packaged SDK also help enormously.
I downloaded the SDK for Mac from Google. The download from Google installed a properly configured Eclipse and SDK in their correct location. I can simply start Eclipse and start following the Android developer's training.
To round up the overall development, I signed up for a Github account. I also had to install Git, but that was pretty painless after following the instructions here. I have resisted installing any Git GUI client as I really like the command line interface.
