Welcome to Al Sims Android development page!
About me
I am an old-timer programmer. No, not in the FORTAN/COBOL era. I'm not that old! I'm a child of the DOS era. I had mainly specialized in system programming, speaking directly to the machine, i.e. programming in assembly language – a little more verbose than Morse code. I was also programming in higher level languages (mainly QBASIC, which I still love, and then C and Pascal), but assembly language was the what really helped me find solutions for really everything in programming, but also find solutions in general.
I started to learn programming in Android in the beginning of 2016, counting on the fact that I had a good knowledge of javascript and Visual Basic, as far as object-oriented programming is concerned. Right, I was too optimistic, even for an experienced programmer, with more than 10 programming languages already in my arsenal! So, I left aside Android for the moment and started to learn Java, which I enjoyed a lot.
About Android development
After 3 months, I came back to attack Android, invigorated and armed with more weapons. Yet, I had to pass through a hell phase, mainly because of Android's asynchronicity element. Android developers, esp. those with little experience in object-oriented programming know well what I mean. This stuff can really drive you crazy until you get quite used to and acquainted with it. In the beginning, it looked something like this: in order to get a yes or no answer from a person, you have to make an application, employ a person to wait for the reply instead of you, and then you have to go! Because, if you stay there waiting for a reply (called a "while loop" in programming), time – and hence life – comes to a stop! You trust instead your employee to take care of the rest, i.e. do the appropriate actions based on the answer the person gives, but which actions, of course, you have already prepared.
But here I am now, developing in Android. And it's fun. When it's not annoying, which can still happen sometimes.
I completed my first app – TouchMe – in mid-April 2016. It's not much, but I just needed to create a product that will give me thrust to continue. Yet, it's still fun.
For a short description of all these apps, see Al_Sims_apps.htm.
For a description and instructions on how to play the Chomp game, see Chomp_instructions.htm.