Why Android development sucks today
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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.
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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
I haven't worked on a "real world" application for android, but I was happy to find out you can leave the emulator on and just restart the app :) This was back in the 1.6 / 2.1 days, haven't touched it since. Also running on Windows was a drag, I suppose Java runs slowly with M$. After I installed Ubuntu Eclipse was snappier. Maybe it was just my machine... my 2 cents :)
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I haven't worked on a "real world" application for android, but I was happy to find out you can leave the emulator on and just restart the app :) This was back in the 1.6 / 2.1 days, haven't touched it since. Also running on Windows was a drag, I suppose Java runs slowly with M$. After I installed Ubuntu Eclipse was snappier. Maybe it was just my machine... my 2 cents :)
Member 8292824 wrote:
Also running on Windows was a drag, I suppose Java runs slowly with M$. After I installed Ubuntu Eclipse was snappier. Maybe it was just my machine...
I think it is more related to the ARM processor running atop the x86 processor, and having a Linux virtual machine running within Windows.
"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