Android supports adobe air. Could go that route to get started, especially as its just JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Granted you could go the flash and action script route but the first way is easier and just as powerful.

Thanks guys. I think Air might be ok for one of my my "warm-up" starting ideas, but pretty soon I think I will be getting into needing databases and other things to do most of what I am intending, one app idea is geocaching related so requires all sorts of stuff including Geospatial stuff

I've not done any android development specifically but surely java is the way to go for anything non-trivial.

Zpyder - if you want I can post you a set of open university Java course books - I had to use up 20 free choice credits for a maths course I'm doing and so just picked a Java course as I'm already familiar with it. I don't need the books so am happy to give them away to anyone who might want to make use of them. (its not specific to android or anything but is a good introduction to Java - course is apparently aimed at people with some knowledge of programming concepts but it pretty much starts from scratch anyway and covers all the basics)

coursebooks are from this course:

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/m257.htm

no worries - if you want other general resources see these:

Bruce Eckel has a free book on his website - isn't the latest addition (you can get that from amazon) - but its still useful and its free....

http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIJ/

also if you want video lectures - see the Stanford Courses, their intro to computer science ones:

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

the first one, programming methodology uses Java and might well be useful if you've not done much in the way of programming before (the two after that use C++ rather than Java though)

there are also some courses on MIT's open course ware website

I've done some Android development in the past (I did Unibet's android app for example) before I moved into TA positions.

Probably because its not that inventive(the general concept itself I mean)... I don't mean that in a negative sense or anything but rather if someone is into that area and into technology then surely something like that would be arrived at by relatively few logical steps... there's probably a few people out there who have thought about it and there is that guy (and maybe others) who've implemented it.

Ideas are worthless without implementation and its the implementation that really counts. The fact that this other site exists doesn't have to stop you from doing anything, you can still pursue your idea, you can come up with other ideas/tweaks to it as you progress.

In the context of much larger ventures - social networking sites existed before facebook... look where myspace is now though and who remembers 'faceparty'?