I’m proud to announce the release of The Barbarian Group’s first android app, Gastrodamus. This of course is the Android version of the food truck tracking iPhone app that was released last month. It has all of the same features and food trucks that the iPhone version has, but now works on your Android 2.1+ devices.

For those who aren’t familiar with Gastrodamus, it’s an internal TBG app that tracks food trucks around the city based in the truck’s twitter feeds. You can read more about it at gastrodam.us. There are plans to continue the development of these apps, add more trucks, and include some cool new features too. So look for that in the coming months.

Since all the cool kids want to be an iPhone developer, I decided that I should go the opposite way and learn to develop apps for Android. That’s coming from a flash guy that’s been avoiding HTML 5. Who’s to say you can’t make cool Android apps too? So I set out to learn to do just that.

With the help of Hello, Android to get me started, tutorials on tutsplus.com, and countless hours on stackoverflow, I was able to put together this app. I was lucky enough to go into this with a lot of the work done already. Since the iPhone version was already in the works, it served as a working prototype for my purposes. The interface design and assets were re-approriated from it’s iPhone companion and much of the data was able to be pulled in and used as well.

I would say that most of the challenges that I had developing this app had nothing to do with learning the flow of building an android app or even with learning java, but more with getting the interface to look good. As many of you know, android apps are just plain ugly by default. The default font kind of sucks and if you don’t style anything, it just looks like an “eh” android app. Whereas with iOS development, by default your app looks like a pretty little iPhone app. So my goal was to make this app look like it isn’t necessarily an Android app, using custom buttons, good fonts,and the same assets used for the iPhone version.

By nature, there are a bunch of things that differ between Android OS versions as well as the various phones and cell phone service providers. It’s something that made me want to embrace the Android platform as a user, but also added extra challenges and things to think about as a developer. The most obvious things that I’ve noticed as I upgraded from Froyo to Eclair on my Droid X during development were the transitions between screens and the style of the loaders and notifications, among other things. Everything went from a mildly unappealing red and white on black theme to a more hideous white on chartreusey/cyanish coloring, which doesn’t really go with the look of the app, let alone any other app that you could possibly download. So I let that slide for now and plan to look into ways to un-uglify that stuff. Though on Samsung’s Android phones, it doesn’t look nearly as bad. Again, Google is making me think a little bit harder than I normally would like to. Damn you Google.

Coming from a flash dev background, there were also a bunch of other unique challenges that I wasn’t ready for. I had to think about a lot of different user flows that are unique to mobile development and just don’t exist when developing for the web. One such example is if the user is looking at a truck’s details, then quits the app, then clears the app data (which I frequently do using the Advanced Task Manager app) and then reopens it. What’s supposed to happen? This is not something that a flash developer ever has to worry about, though I know that I’ll be thinking about a lot of other unexpected user flows on my next flash project as a result. I think that building mobile apps is something that all web developers should do at least once (if they haven’t already). It really does make you think in different terms within the realm of what you already know.

So go download Gastrodamus for Android. If you’re an iPhone person, check it out here.