Android ate my hard drive
With all of the buzz about Android (Google’s foray into an OS for mobile devices), I decided that now would be a good a time as any to actually check out the code, and see what I could come up with. The code is actually very similar to Flex, probably due to it being written in Java, so I was able to come up to speed pretty quickly once I began to look into it. The only thing that is taking a little bit of time is knowing what all of the libraries are that comprise the Android code base. Luckily Google has planned for that eventuality and provided a very useful API (as they do with all of their distributed code).
So far I have only downloaded the “Hello World” application (or Hello Android in this case), but that ran without too many issues. The main one that I came across (and the reason for naming this article the way I did), was that each time I ran the Android emulator, my C drive lost about 40 megs of hard drive space. Not realizing this at first, I actually ran out of hard drive space while I was testing.
After some digging, it turns out that the emulator creates a ~41MB temp file on the local drive each time the emulator is run that is Temporary System image file. My only problem is that this is not removed each time you test the device, and, after a while, as I found out, the hard drive will get filled up until those files are deleted. Even finding them was a bit of a pain, but in order to alleviate that pain for others go to
C:\documents and settings\<logged in user>\Local Settings\Temp\AndroidEmulator\
and delete all files that you find in there. This will remove all of the temporary system files that are created each time Android starts up, and save your hard drive space.
If I get time I may start a “how-to” series for Android, so others can see what’s needed to write Android apps. I’m enjoying it so far…perhaps I’ll even buy myself a G1 at some point 