Android app development for dummies book? - android

has anyone ever read/skimmed through this book? it is valuable/very helpful to people such as myself, who are complete noobs to android programming? I am thinking of purchasing one on amazon for $20 but dont know if its going to be a really helpful book.
Also, when i skim through the book on the amazon wesite, it seems to be missing alot of stuff. is that just amazon's preview method or is the book really that simple?

The Amazon preview only shows specific excepts. I learned exclusively from online tutorials and the official documentation, but if you prefer to learn from a book, check out this SO question:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1114287/good-book-for-beginning-android-development

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android - available cloud based testing tools and suites

I was wondering if anyone in the stackoverflow community could point out some cloud based testing tools for android. I would like to be able to test my applications on real devices that I dont have access to and get the full logcat and other data associated with testing. I know there are a lot out there but I would like to hear other peoples experiences with them before I go spending any time or money on trying them out. A quick google search brings up testdroid.com but I have heard of countless others that I couldnt find in the top couple of pages.
Any comments on the matter would be greatly appreciated.
Have a look to this website : http://testdroid.com/

Please give me a 'kick-start' to build an app to log into a web site

Never built an app before.
Downloaded & installed SDK & Eclipse.
For my 'learning experience' I would like to build an app for my Galaxy S II (4.0.4) that will take me to a web site and then log me in, eg: my Gmail Account or my Voip.ms Account
Can someone point me to a tutorial or suggest how I should start such an app?
Is this too complicated to begin with?
Personally, I think this is way too complicated to start as a learner. You may end up spending a lot more time in debugging some code which does not work because of some silly stuff rather than "learning" how to code Android.
I started with a simple app that has few screens, stores some info in local SQLite DB and sends some across to an remote SQL Server over internet. I managed to complete this in 2 weeks and got quite a good hold on Android basics. Now I am working on a much complex app and am not getting stuck in fundamental issues.
Developer.android.com offers some good app examples and tutorials and is the first go-to location when you want to see how to do something Android-related.
As for what you want to do, it will really depend on the website. Going to the website in question, searching for a developer section is the way to go.
There they will explain which API they offer to devs. OAuth + REST are widely adopted but there is no universal solution, it really depends on the website.
A final note : embedding a webpage in an Android app is a very bad idea from an user-experience perspective, Using an API to offer a native app will always result in a better experience.

Openfeint multiplayer game tutorial for android

I'm interesting to develop an android turn-based online game. I read that is possible with OpenFeint, but I didn't found any library. Does anyone know any tutorial for this? Any other alternative?
I'm not interesting in WiFi or Bluetooth solutions, because that is "easy" to solve with sockets...
Thank you!!
I have also users the Skiller Platform and found it very useful.
I have combined it with Andengine (for its physics engine) and got a really cool multiplayer gaming experience.
Here is a link to OpenFeint developers site, It should contain everything you need.
http://support.openfeint.com/dev/welcome/
I'm interested in this same subject for my brand new game and I felt on Skiller.
Even if it was difficult to find out info about this service from other users, it seems to have all I need for my turn-based game, so I suppose to use their SDK and test it on the field.
Besides, I have already used Scoreloop and it seems not have a real-time turn-based multiplayer feature and I think OpenFeint neither.
You need to download the openfeint multiplayer API.
It was (maybe still is) removed from the site for maintainence, but someone has posted a link to it in on of these posts:
https://ofdev.zendesk.com/entries/20256407-where-is-the-multiplayer-api

Collaborative development for Android

Is there any collaborative development site specifically having Android application developers collaborating?
I have looked into the GITHUB. But dint got anything usefull.
Any pointers will be helpfull.
Thanks,
Gamdroid
Each project has its own means of collaboration. Your best bet is to find a project you want to work on, visit its irc channel or join its mailing lists, and engage its community.
Even when you work with others on open source projects, you still do the majority of the work on your own. Usually collaboration only goes as far as submitting patches to the project managers.
If you're looking for a place to get help in real-time, you might try Stackoverflow chat or #android-dev on freenode irc.

How to read Android Market comments?

Reading the users' feedbacks about my apps is really important, but in my phone I can only read those written in the language of my phone (Italian).
Is there a way to read all of them?
A program for PC or a website could be a good solution.
(Actually Cyrket and AndroLib read comments directly from the market, but sometimes they don't update or are very slow).
Thanks.
I think I had a great influence on Google, since now we can read comments directly on the Android Market Developers dashboard.
Haha, great!! :) :) ... it took only 3 days!!

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