I've only just started developing mobile apps, which is something that I've been wanting to learn for a while now. I'm from an indie games studio, making PC games for around the last 3 years, and I finally decided to move into android app development. The only problem I'm having is that I don't know where to start.
The project which I'm aiming to create will be something similar to Instagram, basically a photo-sharing app which allows users to take new photos, or pull them from their device, and add filters to them, before posting them. I have a rough idea of how I could go about doing this, but I need pointing towards any tutorials available for each specific step. So, here's my idea:
Create a UI in eclipse (this wont be a problem for me, I should be able to do this fine through xml files)
Setup a server-side database to store all user info and uploaded images (the images will need to be converted into byte arrays, and I have no idea how to do this through a database). My best idea would be to use a MySQL database to do this.
Add user interactions (likes, favourites, reposts, etc.). This would, again, have to be stored in the database (or, at least, i think it would).
Add the ability to take new photos using the phone's camera (I can probably do this anyway, using the Camera API).
Add the ability to pull existing photos from the device (again, pretty simple to do).
Add the ability to add filters to any photos (I had a look around, and there are some repos and resources which allow you to do this, but they're mainly for iOS development).
Add facebook/twitter integration (possibly) to allow phots to be shared to other social networks.
Create a news feed which shows users all of the latest photos from their friends, and allows them to post their own images to it.
Give all registered users their own wall/page which has their latest posts/images displayed on it.
Add the ability to allow users to follow other users, and display their followed users posts on their news feed.
Yep. It's not going to be easy, and I don't even know if it's possible for me to do alone in Eclipse. However, this is the plan, and I'm going to do my best to learn everything I need to know to do this successfully. My actual question would be how should I start doing this- where do I begin learning how to do all of this?
I've had a look at snapify, which can be edited via Parse, but I won't be spending hundreds of dollars (since I'm 15 and just don't have the available funds) on software. I have extensive knowledge of Java (again, I've been making games for around 3 years, mainly in Java), and various scripting languages. So, hopefully, this will be of some use here.
Thanks in advance,
Josh.
