title: Difference, in minutes, between two dates
body: <p>I need to get the number of minutes between two dates.  I know Joda is the best to use, but this is for an Android project, so I prefer to use a little external libraries as possible, and the app I'm building doesn't require the calculation to be surgically precise.</p>
  
  <p>However, the code I'm using doesn't seem to be working.  I'm trying to get the number of minutes between "11/21/2011 7:00:00 AM" and "11/21/2011 1:00:00 PM" (which should be 360 minutes), but the code I'm using returns 0:</p>
  
  <pre><code>int diff = minutesDiff(GetItemDate("11/21/2011 7:00:00 AM"), GetItemDate("11/21/2011 1:00:00 PM"));
  
  public static Date GetItemDate(final String date)
  {
      final Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(TimeZone.getDefault());
      final SimpleDateFormat format = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss a");
      format.setCalendar(cal);
  
      try {
          return format.parse(date);
      } catch (ParseException e) {
          return null;
      }
  }
  
  public static int minutesDiff(Date earlierDate, Date laterDate)
  {
      if( earlierDate == null || laterDate == null ) return 0;
  
      return (int)((laterDate.getTime()/60000) - (earlierDate.getTime()/60000));
  }
  </code></pre>