Learning Android, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Yamba Project Overview

The best way to learn is by example. After working with thousands of new Android developers and using various example applications to explain some of the unique concepts that this platform has to offer, we have concluded that the best example should meet the following criteria:

Be comprehensive

A great example app should demonstrate most of the unique aspects of building apps for Android. It should cover all main building blocks and their typical usage.

Provide motivation

There should be a good reason to use a specific feature. A great example app will defend the most effective design that also relies on Android building blocks.

Be familiar

The example application should be simple to understand. We want to focus on software design and implementation, and not on explaining user features.

The Yamba Application

The application we picked for this book is a Twitter-like application. We call it Yamba, which stands for Yet Another Micro Blogging App. Yamba lets a user connect to a cloud web service, pull down friends’ statuses, and update his own status.

Yamba covers most of the main Android building blocks in a natural way. As such, it’s a great sample application to illustrate both how various components work individually and how they fit together. Services such as Twitter are more or less familiar to most people, so the features of the application do not require much explanation.

Yamba Versus Twitter.com

Yamba will not work with Twitter.com, at least ...