21–30 of 342 posts
https://buckbuild.com/setup/getting_started.html
If gradle is killing you, I would suggest trying it out.
Warning: we have a few guys in a mobile developer experience team, so I don't know how good it is for indies.
Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet. I don't know from experience. I've been a Java DEV ever since MSFT tried to hijack the Java language with a proprietary version back in 1998, and I abandoned MSFT and never went back. I can imagine trying to be both iOS and Android developer would be about as insane as trying to be both .NET and Java developer. Oi…
I agree multidex is terrible. Google please fix this.
I do not know when I should use a fragment instead of a view. I know the layout reasons google gives in their developer guide but I don't think I have seen a piece of code that really uses fragments that way. So why?
I do like Android development though.
The raptureinvenice.com page isn’t working -- raptureinvenice.com redirected you too many times.
Anyone having same problem?
I don't think that the person is being lazy. I've tried my hand at Android. I will continue to do so. I don't like it for the reasons enumerated in the post. The whole damn thing is a hack at this point. No one has a good generalizable architectural model for laying out an Android project. Attempting to target multiple devices is truly a pain. You can do it. You have to really, really think about. You also have to en…
I wish the big 4 would get their act together and stop pissing on each others legs.
FB is the most recent entry into this clusterfuck. They should be ashamed of the Oculus/GearVR developer experience, it was the determining factor in my abandoning Oculus.
It is the developer that pays the cost in the end.
I think the problem is Android keeps changing the current best practices. I'm not even sure how to know what those are - if you enter code from the Android tutorial into Android Studio, much of it is deprecated.
In January 2011, the way to do tabs in Android was via LocalActivityManager. Then in February 2011, ActionBar.Tab was added. By July 2011, the LocalActivityManager way was deprecated, and ActionBar.Tab was was pointed to as the way.
Then in November 2014 with the release of API 21, ActionBar.Tab was deprecated ( https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/ActionBa... ). So what do we do for tabs now? Who knows? The most current tutorial ( https://developer.android.com/training/implementing-navigati... ) is still telling you to do it in the way that was deprecated two years ago.
That's what is maddening with Android - they have a way to do tabs, add a new way, deprecate the old way within five months, then three years later change their mind and dump the new way - without changing the documentation and telling you the new way to do it, it's all just deprecated.
The tutorial is full of deprecated code. What's the new way to do it? Who knows?
A few years ago some corporate director at Google must have gotten a directive to push Google TV. So then they were pushing all apps to work with Google TV. I guess that fizzled out. The latest thing is making sure our legacy apps work with Chromebooks which allow multiple apps on the screen at the same time.
I don't mind Google and Android continually chasing the new shiny, but I wish they wouldn't have a tutorial full of deprecated code, I wish they didn't change how they do things such as tabs every three years (three new ways to do it in three years). I wish they fixed bugs instead of implementing new features. On code.google.com, developers post bug reports, then many other developers jump on saying they see the same thing, and...a few years later, it just closed for being obsolete.
Another example of continuous churn - Google Analytics looks like its going by the wayside, to be replaced by Firebase. Admob is now integrated into Firebase. So that's a whole other thing that needs to be redone in an app. You have to run to stay in place.
Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet. I don't know from experience. I've been a Java DEV ever since MSFT tried to hijack the Java language with a proprietary version back in 1998, and I abandoned MSFT and never went back. I can imagine trying to be both iOS and Android developer would be about as insane as trying to be both .NET and Java developer. Oi…
I hope not for my sake :) Im currently contracting writing C++, but my previous contract was with the ASP.Net stack. Before that I was working on a lot of Java services (introduced Scala to good effect)
I also have started a side business helping small companies by making small apps helping with their everyday stuff - sometimes Ill make iPad apps with Swift, but more recently Qt/QML to make something that runs on both OSX and Windows desktops natively. I also made (very small!) web apps for them hosted on both Azure (MS stack) and AWS (linux stack)
After a while learning the core aspects of a new language doesn't take very long, and they generally have to address the same high-level concerns. That said, learning iOS development was a continual hassle but feels like it was worth it to have a native app that I can deploy easily using HockeyApp etc.
edit: I will undermine my whole point here by saying that I abandoned a personal Android project because the dev environment felt so ad-hoc and duct-taped. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to get the simulator to render GL properly without any luck (on Windows)
The link from HN redirects me to https://raptureinvenice.com/its-been-real-android-why-im-ret... with this error: The raptureinvenice.com page isn’t working -- raptureinvenice.com redirected you too many times. Anyone having same problem?
I don't think that the person is being lazy. I've tried my hand at Android. I will continue to do so. I don't like it for the reasons enumerated in the post. The whole damn thing is a hack at this point. No one has a good generalizable architectural model for laying out an Android project. Attempting to target multiple devices is truly a pain. You can do it. You have to really, really think about. You also have to en…
But I've found some peace using Android without the mothership. That's CopperheadOS with F-droid:
https://guardianproject.info/2016/03/28/copperhead-guardian-...
It's simple and it works well.
But yeah, things are a bit messy from a development perspective. Too much fragmentation I guess.