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Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#131

Post by flutas »

fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #101
flutas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have actually made my own TextView using just layout so I don't think this comment is warranted. Make sure you handle the following attributes and how they affect each other! > text, bufferType, hint, textColor, textColorHighlight, textColorHint, textAppearance, textColorLink, textFontWeight, textSize, textScaleX, fontFamily, typeface, textStyle, cursorVisible, maxLines, maxHeight, lines, height, minLines, minHei…

>textSelectHandleLeft, textSelectHandleRight Done >textColor, typeface, textColorLink, textFontWeight, textStyle handled by TextPaint in StaticLayout/DynamicLayout. For example textColorLink is just `linkColor` from TextPaint.[0] >text, textSize, maxLines, justificationMode, breakStrategy, hyphenationFrequency, lineBreakStyle handled by StaticLayout/DynamicLayout >shadowColor, shadowDx, shadowDy, shadowRadius mTextPa…

> Only needed if you add a text editor into your text view, which I did not do.

> I'm not going to go through all of these because I'm not sure exactly which side implements them (for example elegantTextHeight sound like something TextView does, but I'm not sure.) I suggest you actually sit down to read TextView before you make comments about it.

Which is exactly my damn point, you expect your case to be the only one used. They have to think about EVERYONE and their use cases and how everything interacts.

Have you handled LTR text correctly, custom unicode in fonts, weird alignment issues due to accent marks?

My guess would be no, simply because you never thought of them.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#132

Post by lookdangerous »

brutus1213 wrote: post #47
sgammon wrote: post #19

Kotlin is a dream. I literally love writing it.

Back when I was in undergrad, I recall how I was taught C. Just read one of the bible books on a weekend, and was ready to go. I was recently taking a look at Kotlin books and literally banged my head on the table. I realized the language has a good rap but it is ridiculously feature-laden .. to the point they threw in the kitchen sink. A key positive of languages is easiness to learn. I really wonder about Kotlin. I…

I found Kotlin easy to pick up, and use, but there are always complicated parts of it I haven't yet grokked. I'm sure a working knowledge of it is easy to obtain but I'm with you on the more dense pieces.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#134

Post by muzani »

ivm wrote: post #113
John23832 wrote: post #13

You should try iOS dev.

It's much, much better. I'm doing both and it always takes at least 2x time to do the same thing on Android. Apple's API are much more consistent and the overall architecture of UIKit is just great (thank to its AppKit ancestor).

The feedback we get is SwiftUI is half-baked while the newer Android stuff is a lot more stable.

OTOH, Apple does a better job at handling things like languages, currencies, and all those experience, whereas Google is notoriously unreliable despite all the best practices. It's common practice to just "force" the wrong locale on an app to handle translations because a user's device would be English-US and yet someone wants the display in another language. OR someone wants a certain local currency in the form of 1.000,00 and not 1,000.00 (which also wreaks havoc with BigDecimal etc) and yet they'll keep the language and formatting as English and you'd have to do some override. We spent weeks on things like this and the iOS solution would just be "use device settings lol"

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#135

Post by WkndTriathlete »

rasz wrote: post #122
iiJDSii wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey thanks for this! I gave it a try, imported and built in my Android Studio ("Koala" if that matters), tried getting it installed on a phone, and unfortunately got this cryptic error: > ninja: error: 'lib/libjpeg.so', needed by 'C:/Users/ADMIN/AndroidStudioProjects/kineticstreamer/app/build/intermediates/cxx/Debug/3xf5p505/obj/arm64-v8a/libkinetic.so', missing and no known rule to make it That being said, I browsed…

>got this cryptic error: > 'lib/libjpeg.so' missing whats cryptic about that?

I get the sense that the only development environment the OP knows at all is Python. With that perspective I understand why they might think that error is cryptic.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#136

Post by WkndTriathlete »

vips7L wrote: post #56
hasbot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gradle replaced Maven which replaced ant which replaced make. The tech treadmill was one of the reasons I retired early and I'm glad I did. What is the new hotness replacing Gradle?

Gradle replacing maven seems like a stretch. Maybe on Android. But everywhere else Maven is still going strong.

I'd like to know where that is because I've watched as a lot of major 3rd-party Java libraries switch to Gradle from Maven.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#137

Post by WkndTriathlete »

brutus1213 wrote: post #47
sgammon wrote: post #19

Kotlin is a dream. I literally love writing it.

Back when I was in undergrad, I recall how I was taught C. Just read one of the bible books on a weekend, and was ready to go. I was recently taking a look at Kotlin books and literally banged my head on the table. I realized the language has a good rap but it is ridiculously feature-laden .. to the point they threw in the kitchen sink. A key positive of languages is easiness to learn. I really wonder about Kotlin. I…

Not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Take the K&R C book. It describes the language itself only - not the standard library. The Kotlin docs describe the language _plus_ parts of the Kotlin standard library which is why it appears to have lots of features. You'd have to read through half the standard C library documentation & pthreads docs in addition to K&R C to get the equivalent experience.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#138

Post by deprecative »

vdfs wrote: post #128
llmblockchain wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get weird bugs where A needs to be 1.71.0 but B needs A at 1.69.0 or 2+. Upgrading A to 2.0.1 will fix A and B but break CDEFG. Sounds like "modern" web development.

It would be interesting to see where this doesn't happen, you can't just update stuff without considering breaking changes and new bugs in new updates

Difference is that you only have to take your lunch break for it to happen in web dev. By the time you get back to work the following day the framework you're using is deprecated. At least with other platforms there tends to be a bit more stability.

Re: Ask HN: Am I crazy or is Android development awful?

#139

Post by deprecative »

pas wrote: post #124
ivm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS has decades-long technical debt as well (NSCell can still be found in the UIs you see), yet it remains incredibly robust aside from the years when Apple shake it with big visual updates.

It's incredibly robust compared to Windows https://recorder.easeus.com/screen-recording-resource/macos-... https://lifehacker.com/tech/mac-os-sonoma-update-fixes-scree... ... okay I don't even know what's this :D

Funny, for a lot of the functionality you get with Windows you have to pay some random dev for with MacOS. Window management alone feels like it's baby's first computer.
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