What's happening on UAT's campus- A blog published by UAT Students.

Greetings and salutations!

When you're going into the Computer Science field, it's a pretty broad environment so you may find that you'll be asking yourself where you want to specialize in. Maybe you'd want to focus on web development, or perhaps building a desktop application.

Throughout my time as a student at UAT, I have found that I liked the above two, however there's one that has been exceptionally fun to work on, and that is the development of Mobile Applications.

There are a lot of languages out there, where I have focused moreso on C# and C++, but if you're strong in the realm of Java, then Android development might be right up your alley as developing for the Android OS is pretty easy with the recent distributions of Android Studio.

In the past I have looked at the Android Development Kit in fascination and wonder of how I could create a mobile application. I have been using an Android device (specifically the Samsung Galaxy lineup) for a couple years now, and I've tinkered around with it but always thought about creating my own application. Now Android Studio wraps all of it up into one huge comprehensive package where we can do many things with ease, such as setting the User Interface (UI) of the application by placing buttons and menus, and then going in to work on all of the back end work to accomplish even more.

In some senses, the process seems expedited where we can work on a lot of amazing projects.

Whether it's building a calendar application to keep track of important events or to share events with friends in the case that it's a convention or a party, or maybe you want to build a timewaster application where you can browse viral images and memes across the internet, there's so much to be able to do and it's simplified to where you can find numerous tutorials all across the internet.

[su_youtube_advanced url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2dodTXARqc"]

The software is free to download and use, and all you really need to set is the permissions on your device to allow for USB debugging and the ability to run third party applications (since you'll be building external applications)! It's a really cool feeling to get something like this up and running, and I highly encourage everyone to pick it up at some point and give it a shot!

If you ever find yourself teaching yourself Java or some flavor of C, I highly recommend looking into some manner of app development! It'll definitely expand upon your skillset!

-Nicholas"TAE"