Creating the project is as simple as can be. An Eclipse plugin is available making Android development a snap. You’ll need to have Eclipse 3.3 (Europa) or higher installed, and you’ll need to install the Android Plugin for Eclipse. Once you have those installed, come back here.

If you were thinking about using the ADT on 3.4M3 (since it says “or higher”), don’t even try, because you can’t even get past the first step of the ‘Hello, Android!‘ tutorial since the wizard won’t even open.

At this point, you might try to click on the ‘OK’ or the ‘Details >>’ button, but this will not work. I don’t know if it’s because I’m on Fluxbox (which isn’t a real desktop environment,) or not, but if it doesn’t work for you, you should Alt+Tab off that window back to the ‘New Project’ wizard and close that dialog. Once that’s closed, you can now go back to the error dialog and close that with the ‘OK’ button.

If you look at your workspace logs, you will find something like the following…

!ENTRY org.eclipse.jface 4 2 2007-11-12 23:20:50.557
!MESSAGE Problems occurred when invoking code from plug-in: "org.eclipse.jface".
!STACK 0
java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: JavaProjectWizardFirstPage_NameGroup_label_text
at com.google.android.adt.project.NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.createProjectNameGroup(NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.java:230)
at com.google.android.adt.project.NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.createControl(NewAndroidProjectCreationPage.java:202)
at org.eclipse.jface.wizard.Wizard.createPageControls(Wizard.java:170)

So it seems like Google is using internal Eclipse APIs or something of that nature (as they appear to be accessing JDT’s externalized strings directly) which got removed in the 3.4 stream. This should be no surprise since the top portion of the two wizards look the same.

While I’m sure we all threw up the ‘Navigator’ view once in a while back in the pre-3.2 days of Eclipse, I can’t say that I’ve opened it up much anymore. With the working set support in the ‘Project Explorer’ view, the ‘Navigator’ is just way too disorganized for me to stand. The only time I ever pull it up nowadays is for a quick view of all the files in my projects (usually for the .* resources that are hidden by default by filters). This is all fine and dandy for us veterans but the presence of two views that seem to offer identical but not actually identical features is a nightmare for new users.

So, if you will, please join the discussion on bug 208693 and voice your opinion on the topic!

The final version has officially gone out the doors! Take note that this doesn’t imply that the team has shifted into low gears at all. Dominik has actually already started working on improving the code completion (with images, for starters,) and I’m hoping to commit some code to allow us to plug into the Common Navigator Framework some time before the end of the week. :) Stay tuned!

As you can see from this article, the OSI has approved the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). It’s a shame that we now have two more open source licenses out in the wild (as people really should be using existing ones whenever possible to reduce confusions), but eh, what can you do?

Bernhard has officially pushed RC1 out into the wilds. We’ve implemented quite a few new features in addition to fixing a good number of bugs. These new features include, but are not limited to, the following:

• ‘Quick Outline’ via Ctrl+O
• faster ‘Outline’ parsing
• better handling of .NET environments
• improvements to the build mechanism
• console hyperlink support
• launching support for .exe files

I’ve tested this on Eclipse 3.2.2 as well as I20071009-2255 and things look okay. Of course, since I don’t really know too much about C#, I can’t really comment on how well it fares as an actual development environment. So, please do download the zip file and give it a go if you can. If you have any features or bugs that you’d like implemented or fixed, please let us know in our issue tracking system on Sourceforge. :)

I’ll be manning a booth for Eclipse at the Ontario Linux Fest tomorrow with Igor. If you happen to be going there, come drop by and say hi! :)

Setting an execution environment in your MANIFEST.MF file isn’t difficult. I mean, PDE provides great tooling for doing this on the ‘Overview’ tab and you can just use the ‘Update the classpath settings’ hyperlink to fix up your other preferences (although I think there’s a bug in a rather odd case, I’ll have to look into it later). Sounds pretty easy, right, just a few mouse clicks?

No, you’re wrong. Because, if Java 6 APIs can somehow sneak in to the Platform, you know there’s something wrong. That issue’s been fixed but 204736 is still an open issue. I hope we can get that resolved quickly. :/

Many moons ago, I brought up the fact that I had no idea what the people at Port 25 did. Today, I was browsing a website when I was told that I had to manually install the Windows Media Player 11 plug-in for Firefox. The provided link brought me to Port 25.

I don’t know where the source code is or if it’s even available, but seeing this download page has cleared things up for me as to just what kind of work it is they do over there.

If you’re thinking about trying out the WPF build of Eclipse, you better be prepared to wade yourself through the UI bugs, because there are quite a few.

The above is only one example of the problems that I’ve faced. As you can imagine, the top image is the WPF build and the bottom one is the regular 32-bit Windows build. Bug 184878 is also another strange issue. I’ll be filing bugs to the SWT team as soon as I gather more information.

I was hit by a kernel panic upon booting the day after I got wireless working on my T61. At the time, I resolved it by not having net.eth0 or net.wlan0 start up upon boot. The dhcpcd client always wasted time trying to get an IP when I wasn’t even connected so I was rather pleased to see that fixing this one problem magically resolved a bigger one.

Unfortunately, it seems that it’s back and I am currently typing this up in my Vista environment. I’m browsing the Gentoo forums right now looking for solutions, we’ll see how that goes.