Revisiting Android Development
In the summer of 2012 I worked on the Ziggo TV Android app. That's almost 5 years ago. Recently I've taken some first steps to get back into developing a new Android app. I'm glad to see some nice changes in Android development:
Android Studio
Back then I did all my development in Eclipse. Android Studio would be available a year later. In the meantime I've been getting used to Jetbrains' PhpStorm since I use this in my day job. The transation to Android Studio has been pretty seamless so far.
Gradle
Ant has been replaced by Gradle as a build system. This could make it easier to mix multiple languages in a project.
Kotlin
Kotlin looks very promising as this could make writing app code more fun. I just didn't enjoy writing Java code that much. I do have to say back then I wrote a lot of Perl code before that. The verbosity of Java was a bit too much for me.
Next steps
The coming weeks I'll have a look at what's currently possible with Android and Kotlin. A first example app using the Spotify Android SDK is available here: https://github.com/snoek09/SpotifyAndroidSdkExample