Entry 29 - Thinking About Buying a New Laptop

I've been experimenting with Android development, and my current laptop is having a hard time handling the load. The processor is an Intel Celeron and memory is 2gigs. It seems this is not enough, especially when I launch the emulator. My laptop's performance really takes a hit. I have a plan with regards to my laptor upgrade, but I may have to move this earlier.

Entry 27 - The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

"The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good."  I heard this quote from a TWiT episode 286.  The quote is from Voltaire, and I got really interested with it, relating it with my venture into creating my first Android application.  My progress has been slow in developing my first Android application, and hearing that quote made me realize some reasons as to why this is.  The first thing that came into my mind is that I'm trying to hard to start off perfectly with my Android development, when I really should have been concentrating on just being able to produce some results.  I'm taking too much effort into finding the right way when I could just try to produce what I want to produce.  I could always just go back next time once I learn that some of my codes could have been coded better.  At least this way, I have faster output, not necessarily the best, but it's better than having no output at all.  I have big plans for this venture, and I've already wasted a lot of time.  When I find myself wasting time again on too much perfectionism, I will remember this quote and hopefully it will put me on the right track once again.

Entry 15 - Android Development

I had always wanted to try out development for mobile devices so I decided to try out Android development.  The reason that I chose Android is because its API is based from Java, and I already have years of experience on Java development.

My first project is a Whack-a-Mole game, and my inspiration for this game is the Whack-a-Monty mini-game in New Super Mario Brothers for Nintendo DS.  I'm using the suggested tools by Google, which is using Eclipse.  The SDK from Google includes an emulator to be able to try out the application.  However, it seems that the emulator eats up a lot of CPU cycles and memory.  My laptop is on the low-end of the spectrum and the emulator does not run that smoothly on my machine.  Due to this, I'm thinking I may need to buy a new laptop so that development would be more efficient.  I'll maybe do that next time, for now, I just want to try to finish a small project.  If the project looks promising, then maybe I'll upgrade my machine.

Status:

• So far, I've only been able to create the starting screen of the application.
• I'm still planning on how the game will look.  I'll ask for some designs from my sister, as she is on the artistic side.