Why Android development sucks today
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Intel has created an x86 hardware accelerated AVD, Google is distributing the needed binaries via the standard distribution channel along side their arm emulator and has good documentation[^] on how to set it up. But the x86 AVD only targets pure Android without any Google apps. As a result it's useless for testing my app without a tedious set of manual hoops[^] to jump through for each app I need to add.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
I'm not patient enough to deal with the emulators, I just one of the various Android devices floating around the house, much less hassle. Of course, that means I can only test on 3 different versions of Android: 2.something, 4.0, and 4.2, but I've only made apps for my personal use so far so it's not an issue.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
then Eclipse is a bit...well...cr@p ... even started learning java
How do you know that Eclipse is crap if you don't even know Java, the language that it is primarily used for...? :doh:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
I installed it to have it ready for learning the language: [^] That was fun...
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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Colin Mullikin wrote:
Also also, this type of half arsed "English" is one of the reasons that people may not read your post.
I'm sorry, what? I do not believe I was writing in incorrect English.
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Lloyd Atkinson wrote:
This type of half arsed "development" tool that Google make for Android ... I gave up trying to get any of it to with with an equally bad IDE
1. I believe the verb tense of make is incorrect. 2. When I initially read it, I couldn't make any sense of what you were saying until I realized that you meant "work with".
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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I'm not patient enough to deal with the emulators, I just one of the various Android devices floating around the house, much less hassle. Of course, that means I can only test on 3 different versions of Android: 2.something, 4.0, and 4.2, but I've only made apps for my personal use so far so it's not an issue.
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Lloyd Atkinson wrote:
This type of half arsed "development" tool that Google make for Android ... I gave up trying to get any of it to with with an equally bad IDE
1. I believe the verb tense of make is incorrect. 2. When I initially read it, I couldn't make any sense of what you were saying until I realized that you meant "work with".
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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I think the term your looking for is "Slowulator". I've seen the Android emulators taking 10 minutes to boot up even on an Intel i5 based system.
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Yeah, I've seen it. The professor for the Android class I took last semester managed to get around 20 Android tablets for students who didn't have an Android device because the emulator was basically unusable on the school's computers (and they were new computers too, just not high-end).
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Maybe it's just the difference between the two emulators, but in the last four years of Android development using Eclipse, I've not encountered any issues (other than minor hiccups that were of my own doing).
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
The problem with the Arm emulators is that they're almost slow enough to allow this process without introducing extra lag:
- Start the Emulator
- Get bored waiting
- Fly to England
- Meet DD and Nagy at the pub
- Try to keep up with them
- Inevitably get drunk under the table
- Sober up
- Enter rehab
- Complete rehab
- Fly home
- Click on something
- Goto Step 1
Which makes it an utter disaster when I don't have hardware available to fondle.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Oh, I do apologise for making two mistakes. :|
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Apogoly excepted. Jest dent mac ony moor. ;)
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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The problem with the Arm emulators is that they're almost slow enough to allow this process without introducing extra lag:
- Start the Emulator
- Get bored waiting
- Fly to England
- Meet DD and Nagy at the pub
- Try to keep up with them
- Inevitably get drunk under the table
- Sober up
- Enter rehab
- Complete rehab
- Fly home
- Click on something
- Goto Step 1
Which makes it an utter disaster when I don't have hardware available to fondle.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
The first few times I started the emulator, it was painfully slow, but then after I realized everything that it was having to do, my patience increased.
"One man's wage rise is another man's price increase." - Harold Wilson
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
"Show me a community that obeys the Ten Commandments and I'll show you a less crowded prison system." - Anonymous
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Oh, I do apologise for making two mistakes. :|
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I didn't mean it as an "insult" (can't think of a better word at the moment) to you. The feeling was more directed towards some of your compatriots who like to be sticklers for spelling and grammar of the "Queen's English". :)
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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This gave me a nice big chuckle considering the amount of whining that I read in The Lounge every day about Visual Studio... :doh:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
Think with every tool that so many people use, every change is going to bring debate as to whether it's necessary or even useful, but that's also a good indication as to how widespread its use is. I think it's starting to suffer from some of the same unnecessary feature additions as other MS products (changes to say they changed something) but I guess the package has to progress one way or another. If you've used Studio from way back though, I'm sure you'll appreciate the progress.
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Visual Studio is really quite good compared to the competition... Probably best thing to come out of MS.
Yeah, that's exactly what I said 3+ years ago in my article - Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android - Marketplace Comparison[^] If you guys are coming from C#/Visual Studio background, be sure to check out http://xamarin.com/monoforandroid[^] - it's a shame that Google is not actively supporting those guys @ Xamarin, considering their runtime is actually way faster than Dalvik; see this link: http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/#performance[^].
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Intel has created an x86 hardware accelerated AVD, Google is distributing the needed binaries via the standard distribution channel along side their arm emulator and has good documentation[^] on how to set it up. But the x86 AVD only targets pure Android without any Google apps. As a result it's useless for testing my app without a tedious set of manual hoops[^] to jump through for each app I need to add.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
Hi Dan, Have any of you guys considered looking at NSBasic? http://www.nsbasic.com[^] A friend of mine needed a specialized calculator so I'm writing him one. I can deploy it so that it runs on either my iPhone or his Android phone. In fact I just bought a cheap Android pad (Lenovo IdeaPad) to test it on. Yeah, it runs as a web app on the device but the presentation is clean and seems to have good potential. It's not expensive, either. I think you can also develop native iOS apps with it (not sure about Android) using something they call "Phone Gap" which I haven't checked out yet. I don't know how good NSBasic is for writing a high-performance graphics application but it really is a pretty cool idea. You can write in BASIC or JavaScript with it. I'm primarily a C# / VB.Net developer so having an IDE that implements a VB-like syntax (and programming model) is a real plus. You really ought to check it out if you want to program to multiple portable device platforms. It's very cool. -CB
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Intel has created an x86 hardware accelerated AVD, Google is distributing the needed binaries via the standard distribution channel along side their arm emulator and has good documentation[^] on how to set it up. But the x86 AVD only targets pure Android without any Google apps. As a result it's useless for testing my app without a tedious set of manual hoops[^] to jump through for each app I need to add.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
We have been using Xamarin for about 7 months now. For me it puts Android development on a different perspective. There's a Starter (free) version to try, it might change your opinion! :-D
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Intel has created an x86 hardware accelerated AVD, Google is distributing the needed binaries via the standard distribution channel along side their arm emulator and has good documentation[^] on how to set it up. But the x86 AVD only targets pure Android without any Google apps. As a result it's useless for testing my app without a tedious set of manual hoops[^] to jump through for each app I need to add.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
Well, my preferred dev env is vc++ win32 for a desktop WinXP or better os. But for android dev, you kinda are forced into Eclipse and java. It's not too brutal to use the NDK to use c++ libraries, but you're still pretty much stuck in Eclipse. But I don't whine about it. Eclipse really isn't that bad. In fact, it's really pretty great. I don't know about you, but I remember compiling C on my Amiga 500 and writing 6502 on my c64. I've written C for AVRs in that dev env, too. Learn the toolchain, write the code, get it done and quit whining that it isn't as nice as some OTHER thing. Also, be amazed that you can write code for a freakin handheld computer with a full GUI, sensors galore and a screen with more pixels per inch than your desktop. I'll jump through some hoops for THAT.
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We have been using Xamarin for about 7 months now. For me it puts Android development on a different perspective. There's a Starter (free) version to try, it might change your opinion! :-D
Even if the free version was good enough*; the problem becomes that I'm not a one man shop and creating something that I'm the only person who really knows what he's doing with isn't good business practice. * I'm not sure what the 32k of IL cap equates to in terms of APK size; but I'm already pushing several MB of the latter.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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Well, my preferred dev env is vc++ win32 for a desktop WinXP or better os. But for android dev, you kinda are forced into Eclipse and java. It's not too brutal to use the NDK to use c++ libraries, but you're still pretty much stuck in Eclipse. But I don't whine about it. Eclipse really isn't that bad. In fact, it's really pretty great. I don't know about you, but I remember compiling C on my Amiga 500 and writing 6502 on my c64. I've written C for AVRs in that dev env, too. Learn the toolchain, write the code, get it done and quit whining that it isn't as nice as some OTHER thing. Also, be amazed that you can write code for a freakin handheld computer with a full GUI, sensors galore and a screen with more pixels per inch than your desktop. I'll jump through some hoops for THAT.
Take the time to Google basic4android and read their forum. You will see lots of happy developer libraries and demo code. You can also download the IDE free (though it does not access libraries until you buy it.) It has a both a USB & Wifi bridge which is a delight to use and its debugger does all it needs. You can encrypt files and source code and build your own libraries. I have used it now for two months and I love it.
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Take the time to Google basic4android and read their forum. You will see lots of happy developer libraries and demo code. You can also download the IDE free (though it does not access libraries until you buy it.) It has a both a USB & Wifi bridge which is a delight to use and its debugger does all it needs. You can encrypt files and source code and build your own libraries. I have used it now for two months and I love it.
I'm just fine with Eclipse. I don't see why people don't like it. modern android phones already support a wifi adb connection (and ftp). i just test with the phone instead of those slow virtual devices. i'm not writing anything for the masses.
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I actually like Eclipse, but that could be a result of it being the first IDE I ever used... :doh: Also, Eclipse takes up a fraction of the disk space that VS does. :thumbsup: Also also, this type of half arsed "English" is one of the reasons that people may not read your post.
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
Eclipse is only usable if you use it on a fast machine with lots of RAM. It is totally crap on my netbook: takes over 15 seconds for the splash screen to come up and over 2 minutes before anything works. I don't know how badly written the java stuff is but it is really sluggish on a netbook (1.6GHz Dual Core, 4Gb RAM) The one for developing Java programs also leaks very badly. If I leave it on overnight, the next day, it would have crashed with an out of memory error. VS9 is ready for work before the Eclipse splash screen even pops up. It is actually usable on a 300MHz PC with 256Mb RAM. VS10 is just as bad as Eclipse and takes just as long and wants tons of resources. Doesn't even come with help: you have to download all 2Gb of it from MS. It is quite a bad rewrite: it doesn't upgrade properly and has quite a few annoying/missing features that the old ones had. No idea about VS11. What's nice about Eclipse is you can customize it to what you want with the SDK. Basically, it is just a framework which can be used for all sorts. Maybe we'll see a mobile phone based on eclipse one day.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
then Eclipse is a bit...well...cr@p ... even started learning java
How do you know that Eclipse is crap if you don't even know Java, the language that it is primarily used for...? :doh:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
Colin Mullikin wrote:
How do you know that Eclipse is crap if you don't even know Java, the language that it is primarily used for..
I have a lot of experience in both Java and C#. Certainly for the way that I use IDEs Eclipse suffers greatly in comparison to VS.
