Africa and the Mobile Handset

Africa, in the world today, has greatly influenced the growth of mobile technologies, harnessing the way we communicate. With new mobile applications being built for more sophisticated communities, we too can have our own applications designed to suit our African needs.

Let's discuss and share ideas on the kind of cool things you would like your mobile handset to do for you. Together, we can build a gadget that will help the farmer sell his produce, provide good educational content for impoverished communities, deliver health services information to our health workers, monitor government community projects, etc.

Please feel free to post your ideas, suggestions and comments !

Eclipse Helios is unstable with Android

When I tried to run my first helloworld.java application on eclipse helios, I realised that helios does not actually output anything. I would imagine that helios is still under development by eclipse, therefore, new android developers should stick to eclipse ganymede and galileo, they are more stable !

Setting up Eclipse for Android development with a slow internet connection

1. Download the Android SDK onto your disk or local drive.2. The rest of the SDK components will not be installed using the SDK Manager, simply point your browser to:  http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/ . Quickly find the android platform that you want to download by pressing Ctrl+F ( In FireFox), we want to find the latest Android platform 2.2 so we typed in: 2.2 . Other available platforms: 2.1, 1.6 and 1.5. 

2. Highlight the part: android-2.2_r02-windows/linux/macosx.zipcopy it to the end of the url above. Download the zipped document, unzip the contents to the "Platforms" folder in your Android SDK directory. This step will allow you to set the build target for your android applications, and

3. Follow the rest of the instructions i.e steps 1,2 and 3 on http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html . The above instructions cater for step 4 on http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html .

4. All the best !