question about making an App for Android

[Akkana Peck]

> pyotr filipivich <phamp at mindspring.com>
> >"A simple program" to divide the amount of "today's" daylight into 12
> >even '"hours", so that Dawn begins the First hour, the third hour is
> >mid-morning, noon is the middle of the day, the ninth hour mid after
> >noon, and the twelfth hour ends at sunset.  Is simple, no?  {no.}

Dennis Lee Bieber writes:
> 	Even ignoring "phone" this is anything but simple. It relies upon
> knowing one's latitude and date to allow computing the angle of the sun.
[Details of some excellent references -- I like Duffett-Smith's
calculator book best for readability).

But if you don't need it to be a phone app, if you use PyEphem, it's
all simple and you don't need to know any of the equations behind
it. So it really depends on your goals and what you want to learn.

> >But getting from the development environment (the desktop) to the
> >phone is something I am clueless about.
> 
> 	Getting anything that is not written in Java onto an Android phone is
> likely going to be a pain. You will most likely need an environment that
> runs on ARM architecture. And I have no idea what iOS requires.

For an app with a relatively simple user interface, you can write a
web page in HTML/Javascript and make it installable on both Android
and iOS. Google "Progressive Web App" for details. Although it means
you can't use Python (alas!), it's *much* simpler than dealing with
either an Android Java devkit or a cross-platform setup like Kivy.
I've used PWAs for simple astronomy programs like showing Jupiter's
or Saturn's moons.

        ...Akkana