Starting an Android emulator automatically on MacOSX after Login via LaunchAgent

Homebrew offers a simple means to install additional software packages on your MacOSX computer. After initial installation of brew as admin user execute:

brew install android-sdk # will install the newest SDK starter package
android update sdk # this will open the UI, now install all platforms
chgrp -R staff /usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/r7 # otherwise the ANDROID_HOME will be owned by the wheel group and you may not start anything as non admin user.

To use tools like the emulator add ANDROID_HOME and ANDROID_SDK_ROOT to your $HOME/.profile or $HOME/.bash_profile (if the latter exists, use this):

ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=/usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/r7
ANDROID_HOME=$ANDROID_SDK_ROOT
export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT ANDROID_HOME

Create an emulator called Wildfire using the android command. Now if you want the emulator to be started automatically after you login, put the following into $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/emulator-wildfire.plist:

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
	<plist version="1.0">
	<dict>
	<key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
	<dict>
	<key>ANDROID_SDK_ROOT</key>
	<string>/usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/r7</string>
	<key>ANDROID_HOME</key>
	<string>/usr/local/Cellar/android-sdk/r7</string>
	</dict>
	<key>KeepAlive</key>
	<true/>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>android.emulator-wildfire</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
	<string>/usr/local/bin/emulator</string>
	<string>-avd</string>
	<string>Wildfire</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
	</dict>
	</plist>

view raw emulator-wildfire.plist hosted with ❤ by GitHub

After you saved the file, execute launchctl load $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/emulator-wildfire.plist. From now on the emulator starts whenever you (or your CI user) logs in.

A simple way to get a git hash as version info into Android applications using Maven

I recently decided to do some Android programming. Enters Mittagstisch KA. I really like to know which sources applications are built from. Using Maven and it's Antrun-Plugin this is rather simple:

This will create a new string resource file, which is automatically picked up by Android's resource compiler and might be read in your application by an Activity like this:

final String gitHash = getResources().getString(R.string.info_githash);

Do not forget to add res/values/githash.xml to your .gitignore file otherwise you will be committing infinitely :-).