[MUSIC] >> Hi, I'm professor Adam Porter of the University of Maryland. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to Programming Mobile Applications for Android handheld systems. Now as I'm sure you know, handheld systems such as smart phones and tablets are becoming extremely popular. In fact, some people even say that handheld systems are spreading faster than any other technology in the history of the world. For example, did you know that each year there are three times as many smart phones activated as there are children born in the entire world? And did you know that today more people access the Internet using mobile devices than using desktop and laptop computers combined? Or how about this? Did you know that by 2015, it's projected that over 500 billion mobile apps will have been downloaded? Now, I certainly can't predict the future, but I think it's safe to say that if you want to work in the IT sector over the next five to ten years, then you probably should know something about handheld systems and about the apps that run on them. And that's where this class comes in. In this course, you'll get a broad overview of the Android platform, one of the two most popular mobile platforms in the world today. And we'll be focusing primarily on the user facing parts of app development, the things that users see and touch when they're using an app. And remember, that this course is just one part of a multipart series, or specialization called mobile cloud computing with Android, or MoCCA, for short. And while this course focuses on the user-facing parts of app development, those other courses focus on other behind the scenes aspects of app development. Things like handling concurrency, security, and connecting your apps to powerful services running remotely in the cloud. And of course, I think that each of these topics is really important. So I encourage you to find our more about MoCCA by taking a look at this link. Now before I go too much into this course, let me take a second to introduce myself. Like I said earlier, my name is Adam Porter, and I've been a professor or computer science at the University of Maryland for almost 25 years. And I was studying and working in the IT field for about ten years before that. Today, at the university, and as a private consultant, I publish research and advise clients on issues related to software engineering. So broadly speaking, the tools, techniques and processes that help people develop software that works as it's supposed to and is delivered on time and on budget. And that work has been funded and used by major organizations including IBM, AT&T Lucent and the United States Navy, just to name a few. Now over the past few years, I've started spending a lot more of my time on handheld systems. For instance, in around 2008, I worked with a colleague from Apple to develop the University of Maryland's first course on programming handheld systems for the iPhone. And then a year or two later, as Android matured, I created a similar course focused this time on Android. In fact, after many iterations and modifications, that course evolved into the very course that you're taking part in today. So since I've taught some version of this course several times, let's talk a little bit more about what this course and what I think you can do to get the most out of it. Now first of all, as I said, this course is based on one that I teach to juniors and seniors at the University of Maryland. So it's actually very important to me that what I do in this Coursera course feeds back to my on-campus students, and vice versa. What I do for my on-campus course should improve this Coursera course as well. Now in particular, this means that this course is not a gentle introduction to Android. It's not a taste of Android. No. This is more or less the same course I teach to my on campus students. So, we start at a pretty high level and we go kind of fast. And I can do that in my on campus course because I know our system and I know my students. And I know that they have a certain level of prior knowledge and that they know what I expect from them. I know, for example, that my students know Java very well. I know that they also programmed a bit in languages besides Java. I also know that they have taken other background courses. And moreover, I know that they expect to get their hands dirty. The dig for information on their own, and I know that they'll ask questions when they need to. And so, if that doesn't sound right for you, you don't know Java, you're completely new to programming, or you don't have the time or the inclination to look up information on your own, then this might not be the right course for you at this time. Instead you might consider a course that's targeted to a more beginning student, such as Lawrence Angrave's Coursera course, The creative, Serious and Playful Science of Android Apps. Or you might want to find a good Java tutorial and do that first. So, don't be afraid to try one of these other things first and then come back here when you're ready. We're not going anywhere, and we'll keep the light on. Now, as we go through the course, we'll generally stick to the following organization. Each week, I'll start by posting a set of the video lectures. And those lectures generally last anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half. I tend to speak pretty slowly because we have many non-native English speakers in this class, so if you understand English well, then feel feel, feel free to crank up the playback speed. And in each of the video lectures, I'll normally start by talking about some concept or API, and as I go through the lecture, I'll demo several sample applications. And I'll show screencast where I walk through the source code for those sample applications that I've just demonstrated. In fact, all told, I'll show you about 110 of these sample applications. And you can get the source code for all of these applications at the courses GitHub repository, which is available at this link. Now each week, I'll also assign a graded quiz. Quizzes are meant to reinforce the lecture material, and sometimes to introduce additional concepts and resources. And you can take these quizzes as many times as you like. And finally, each week, I'll also assign one or more labs. In these labs we'll usually ask you to implement an application. In most cases, the labs will come with skeleton code that implements, say, 75 to 90% of the application. So you'll need to read and understand that skeleton code and then you'll need to fill in the parts that are missing. So you can think of these labs as a kind of drill. They focus in on just a few specific things, not on everything at once. And so to make sure that you do get chance to put it all together at the end of weeks four and eight I will also assign labs in which you develop a simple app completely from scratch. Okay. So before I finish up, let me say a few words about the specific topics we'll cover in this course. The material in this course is delivered as two four week mini courses, called part one and part two. Part one introduces the Android platform and its development tools. And it explains the basic concepts you'll need to create simple Android apps. Part two, on the other hand, dives into the additional services that come into play when you're ready to create more advanced apps. Now as I said, each of these parts runs for four weeks. In week one, we'll talk about the Android platform and the Android development environment. In week two, we'll cover how apps are created and we'll go over the activity class, which is the primary class that's responsible for presenting an apps user interface. The following week, I'll introduce intents and permissions, which allow one app or activity to start up and use other apps and activities. And I'll also talk about the fragment class, another class that plays a key role in presenting an apps user interface. And finally, in week four, I'll go into detail about the full range of classes and patterns used to create sophisticated user interfaces. At this point, we'll have finished part one, and we'll be ready to dive in on part two. In week five, we'll discuss a number of topics, including user notifications, event notification using the broadcast receiver class and using alarms to invoke code at prescheduled times. Week six discusses how to handle concurrency with threads, Asynctasks and handlers, and also discusses how to acquire data over the internet. Week seven gets into more visual topics, including graphics and animation, touch processing, and multimedia. And finally, during week eight, we'll focus on using the many sensors that now come standard on most handheld devices. And we'll talk about how to acquire and display location information. And we'll then close out week eight with a lecture on how to manage and store data. And one more thing. To help make sure that the skills you're learning in this course are applicable to things you might do in the work world, I've partnered up with some folks on Amazon App Store team. And they have agreed to create some guest lectures to share some of their hard-won experience about building and publishing successful Android apps. Amazon will also offer a free e-book to all students of this course. And I'll have more information on this later in the course. And also, as a special part of this partnership with Amazon, the top fifty students from this course will be given the option to share their resumes directly with Amazon recruiters. Again, we'll have more on this as the course progresses. So that's all for my overview on the course. Please join me next time as I introduce you to the Android platform.
