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Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

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Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#41

Post by eropple »

pugz wrote: post #28
tomasien wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose to each their own, but if anything except for the provisioning/plist stuff in Xcode is complicated to you, you must be used to something else because in and of itself xCode is phenomenal.

xCode (sic) is far from phenomenal. I have been writing iOS apps since 2008 and Mac apps longer than that and Xcode has made significant progress, but is still mediocre. It's very telling that Jetbrains managed to pull AppCode out of nowhere and blitz Xcode. I had never before used an IntelliJ-based IDE, but within a week or two my productive increased severalfold. It really puts Apple's efforts to shame.

I'm a big IntelliJ fan and I can't roll with AppCode. I admire the work, but XCode feels a lot better for native code development. (I do work in C++ and only use Objective-C for tooling via Obj-C++, though.)

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#42

Post by Ologn »

rikthevik wrote: post #19

Has anyone seen good results with the new Qt mobile tools? I realize that it won't look quite native - but Qt's got a pretty good track record, and if I could write apps using C++ instead of Java, and get some cross-platform capability, I'd certainly be interested.

I have probably been writing and porting more C++ code on Android lately than Java code. I haven't done much with QT. Some of the apps used the SDL library. Some of the apps have been OpenGL 1.x code ported to OpenGL ES.

I guess it all depends on what platforms you have in mind.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#43

Post by andrewflnr »

eropple wrote: post #23
tomasien wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that, and that's fine - I appreciate the suggestion and will probably use it, but if that's actually the best then people will take Android dev more seriously when the best is the standard IDE. Right now Eclipse is the default and it blows.

Eclipse is the default for most Java development, but I know fairly few serious Java developers who use it. Some do, I'm not saying they don't exist, but IntelliJ--of which Android Studio is a fork--is generally the go-to tool amongst the experienced, skilled Java folks I know. Double for Scala. (I used nothing but IDEA for Android work at my last job, for about eighteen months - Eclipse is certainly not required and…

I was wondering how IDEA compared to Eclipse for android dev, in large part because I'm interested in porting my app to Kotlin, if it's not too huge a jump. It's good to hear that it works well, despite not being the "official" default.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#45

Post by cageface »

eropple wrote: post #41
pugz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

xCode (sic) is far from phenomenal. I have been writing iOS apps since 2008 and Mac apps longer than that and Xcode has made significant progress, but is still mediocre. It's very telling that Jetbrains managed to pull AppCode out of nowhere and blitz Xcode. I had never before used an IntelliJ-based IDE, but within a week or two my productive increased severalfold. It really puts Apple's efforts to shame.

I'm a big IntelliJ fan and I can't roll with AppCode. I admire the work, but XCode feels a lot better for native code development. (I do work in C++ and only use Objective-C for tooling via Obj-C++, though.)

AppCode's C++ isn't quite there yet, I agree. Lately I'm also mostly using XCode because a huge chunk of my codebase is modern C++.

But for pure Obj-C apps I'll take AppCode every day. There are so many little usability and productivity wins over Xcode.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#46

Post by eropple »

andrewflnr wrote: post #43
eropple wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eclipse is the default for most Java development, but I know fairly few serious Java developers who use it. Some do, I'm not saying they don't exist, but IntelliJ--of which Android Studio is a fork--is generally the go-to tool amongst the experienced, skilled Java folks I know. Double for Scala. (I used nothing but IDEA for Android work at my last job, for about eighteen months - Eclipse is certainly not required and…

I was wondering how IDEA compared to Eclipse for android dev, in large part because I'm interested in porting my app to Kotlin, if it's not too huge a jump. It's good to hear that it works well, despite not being the "official" default.

Android Studio is completely replicated within IDEA itself, so there's that too. We used a Maven build that worked really well within IDEA--it correctly wired up the Android facet and everything.

I don't know anything about Kotlin on Android, though.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#47

Post by makeramen »

tomasien wrote: post #13
jaydz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Android Studio a shot. Makes laying out the UI in XML a breeze with its excellent intellisense.

I've heard that, and that's fine - I appreciate the suggestion and will probably use it, but if that's actually the best then people will take Android dev more seriously when the best is the standard IDE. Right now Eclipse is the default and it blows.

Actually "Eclipse is the default" is probably going to be false very soon. Every mid to senior level Android developer I know has migrated to Android Studio for months already. The advantages of Gradle and Studio are very apparent almost immediately.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#48

Post by traek »

batiudrami wrote: post #21
joezydeco wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then you read about stuff like this[1]: "Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software . For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture…

That's the original Galaxy S, a device which is now 5 years old. There are plenty of apps which no longer support iPhones that old. "It's too hard" or "it doesn't make enough money" are more than reasonable. A software limitation in a 5 year old device is not.

It wasn't 5 years old when the article was written, though. The Galaxy S was less than 2 years old at that time.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#50

Post by zacharypinter »

my3681 wrote: post #4

I develop apps for both major mobile platforms, and when I speak with designers and artists about Android and iOS, they overwhelmingly prefer iOS. Since they use iOS devices themselves, it is their go to platform. It is almost always the one they want to work with. Oddly, when I ask them why, the answers are mostly qualitative. It has nothing to do with "reaching the most people" or "getting exposure". It's a simple…

Sounds akin to developers picking the companies they work for based on the programming languages/tech stacks they get to work with.

I can definitely sympathize.

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