Newbie - few questions :(

Hi

I'm new to Android Development but have an IT background. 17 years ago, started on Pascal and Decforms - on a VAX - for you younger folk - that's a main frame and not a Hoover http://www.vax.co.uk/ Moved onto COBOL and progressed to DEC Alpha. Built some simple VB apps along the way. Had a bit of C back in College before all this but didn't use it in the working world.
About 3 years ago, got a chance to get into Java - got about 6 months of it and company made us all redundant Back in work since but doing Application Development - VBA Excel makes this seem complicated.

So, i wanted to get back into some development.

I've gone through some tutorials etc and read up on some APIs. However, i cannot seem to find how to do what i want to do.

I basically want to have an app that will provide me with an audit log of my phone's activity e.g. when i open mail, open texts, open a game. All along with a timestamp. Now,i was looking at LogCat - i thought simplest way was for an app to basically query the existing system log ? But, when i opened a few apps, i found some package names were the same as the "market name" but not all. So, was trying to find a way to get the "market name" of any apps opened with a time stamp.

I also was thinking if i could listen to the launcher somehow ? Obviously the log version would require less resources, as the log would be populated by the system and i'd just query it when the app needs to.

I apologise again if i am asking anything is obvious. The Java side of things is easier to get into than understanding the workings of Android ! But, i'm reading all the time and i'll eventually get up to speed

TIA
Rob

Thanks for the welcome, Chris

I'll have a look and try get a more appropriate section