Android lessons for beginners (startandroid.ru)

Recently I have started translating lessons on startandroid.ru into English. It's a famous web site for those who want to start programming Android and have no priror experience with it. The lessons are really awesome and now English speaking audience will be able to read them. Each lesson describes one subject or feature so you can read only the lesson you need.

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I've started learning Android on this web-site and now I would like to pay back the author and make some translations. The following lessons are already published:

• Lesson 1. Introduction
• Lesson 2. Installing and configuring development environment Eclipse and SDK Tools
• Lesson 3. Creating AVD. The first application. Android project structure
• Lesson 4. Layout elements and their properties
• Lesson 5. Layout-file for Activity. XML Representation. Changing screen orientation.
• Lesson 6. Layout types. Key differences and properties.
• Lesson 7. Layout parameters for View-elements.
• Lesson 8. Working with layout elements from code.
• Lesson 9. Event listeners with Button example
• Lesson 10. Optimizing event listeners implementation
• Lesson 11. res/values folder. Using application resources
• Lesson 12. Logs and Toast messages.
• Lesson 13. Creating a simple menu
• Lesson 14. Menu, groups, order. MenuInflater and xml-menu
• Lesson 15. Context menu
• Lesson 16. Creating layout programmatically. LayoutParams
• Lesson 17. Creating View-components in a running application
• Lesson 18. Changing layoutParams in a running application
• Lesson 19. Creating a simple calculator
• Lesson 20. Animation
• Lesson 21. Creating and starting an Activity
• Lesson 22. Intent, Intent Filter, Context - theory
• Lesson 23. Activity Lifecycle. Activity states
• Lesson 24. Activity Lifecycle, example about changing states with two Activities
• Lesson 25. Task. What is it and how it is formed.
• Lesson 26. Intent Filter - practice
• Lesson 27. Reading action from Intent
• Lesson 28. Extras - passing data using Intent
• Lesson 29. Invoking Activity and getting a result. startActivityForResult method.

So Android beginners, welcome! And let's study together!

You can find the complete list of lessons published here.

How to enable USB debugging on Android 4.2

To enable USB Debugging and make Developer options appear in Settings menu, just go to Settings ->About phone/tablet and tap Build number 7 times.

That's it! Now you have Developer options available in your device Settings.

Eclipse doesn't open Android XML Library files.

Recently I ran into an issue that Eclipse didn't want to open XML files that are located in android.jar/res.layout directory. The reason is that android uses Android Common XML Editor. The only thing to do to open binary xml files is to change default XML Editor to Android Binary XML Editor. To do so go to Window -> Preferences -> General -> Editors -> File Associations and change default XML Editor to Android Binary XML Editor.

Could not open the editor.

Problem Solution