The sections below describe other tools that you can use when building Android applications.
All of the tools are included in the Android SDK and are accessible from the
<sdk>/tools/ directory.
android is an important development tool that lets you:
If you develop in Eclipse with the ADT plugin, you can perform these tasks directly from the IDE. To create Android projects and AVDs from Eclipse, see Developing In Eclipse. To update your SDK from Eclipse, see Adding SDK Components.
The mksdcard tool lets you quickly create a FAT32 disk image that you can load in the emulator, to simulate the presence of an SD card in the device. Here is the usage for mksdcard:
mksdcard [-l label] <size>[K|M] <file>
The table below lists the available options/arguments
| Argument | Description |
|---|---|
-l |
A volume label for the disk image to create. |
size |
An integer that specifies the size (in bytes) of disk image to create.
You can also specify size in kilobytes or megabytes, by appending a "K" or "M" to
<size>. For example, 1048576K, 1024M. |
file |
The path/filename of the disk image to create. |
Once you have created the disk image file, you can load it in the emulator at startup using the emulator's -sdcard option. For more information, see Android Emulator.
emulator -sdcard <file>
The dx tool lets you generate Android bytecode from .class files. The tool
converts target files and/or directories to Dalvik executable format (.dex) files,
so that they can run in the Android environment. It can also dump the class files
in a human-readable format and run a target unit test. You can get the usage and
options for this tool by using dx --help.
