Testing Android apps using a Nook HD

I've been doing some android development on the side lately, and have been using my phone for testing since my experience with emulation has been terrible so far.  However my phone is an old Gingerbread phone and there were some features in the newer versions of Android that I wanted to take advantage of.  I have a Nook HD which is built upon the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, so I took on the task of using the Nook to test.

It wasn't the easiest experience to configure this, so I wanted to document this while it is fresh in my mind.  First you need to read this document:

https://nookdeveloper.zendesk.com/entries/21943338-nook-developer-start-up-guide

Start with the standard Android dev environment:  The ADT bundle you download at Google.

You have to install something called the Nook SDK which you can install by using the Android SDK Manager tool inside of Eclipse.  It's in the Window menu.  Then, follow directions in the document.  The SDK Manager tool looks like it is also used to update your dev environment and a bunch of stuff was already selected, so I just installed all of that along with the Nook SDK.  But I really think the Nook SDK was the only thing I needed checked.

You do need to set the PATH variable.

This is where things get stupid.  If you're just using the emulator, I don't think you need this, but of course I wanted to run apps directly on the device.  The Android Debug Bridge (adb) is some kind of command that Eclipse uses to side load apps onto your device for testing.  The document shows you how to test to see if your device is seen by adb.  Mine wasn't seen (of course).  It suggests you install some special drivers.  To get the drivers, you have to register as a Nook developer and get approved.  There are silly questions that you just make up answers to and wait 8 hours, and then you're in.  After that, download the drivers.  In Device Manager, I had to "Uninstall the device", and then click on the device that was labeled BNTV400 (not MyNOOK) and then I install (or maybe it was update) the driver and browse to the driver you downloaded.  Once this was done, adb could see the device.  I did have to adb kill-server, adb start-server, once before it would work with Eclipse.

I'm actually quite surprised I got this working.

Eclipse "intellisense"

Intellisense is actually a Microsoft term for autocompletion functionality in Visual Studio while writing code.  However, Eclipse offers the same feature for Java and Android development.  It's called method selection helper or something like that.  Anyway, it pops up automatically by default but disappears after you select something or type over what it suggests.  To get it back, just use the shortcut key combination of ctrl-space.

Initial Setup of Android Developer Tools (ADT) and Eclipse

I downloaded ADT from Google which comes with Eclipse.  However, when I tried to run Eclipse for the first time, I got a nasty little error about not finding the JRE.  JRE stands for Java Runtime Environment, and as far as I can tell, it must be the equivalent of the .net framework.  I went into Control Panel and uninstalled anything in there that said Java.  Then I put Java JRE into Google and downloaded Java JRE 7 for Windows 64 bit from an Oracle website.  Once I installed it, I found the files in the Program Files\Java\jre7 folder.  I copied this into the AndroidSDK folder where the eclipse.exe file is.  I then renamed it from jre7 to just jre and voila, it worked.  The nasty error message did say where it was looking for the jre, so thats how I knew where to put the files.

What a start.  Hopefully, everything about android development isn't this weird.