Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
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Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#2An application I'm currently building (shameless plug - www.quaffic.com) will definitely benefit from this post. If nothing else, I feel affirmed that we're on the right track. From what you're saying, the value of ACRA is huge. That's my big takeaway at this point. I wondered what the normal process was for getting crash reports from users.
Also, what did you end up doing to alleviate your JSONObject problem? JSONSmart?
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#3I was surprised by the word "post-mortem" in the title. Looks like the project is alive and well.
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#4"I’m a firm believer that premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Gah. Premature optimization is not a willful blindness to all matters performance related. It is a perversion of computer science that it keeps being twisted to such grossly different meanings that Knuth's original statement.
Don't celebrate and herald your invalid philosophical righteousness with the Knuth quote (as we've seen over, and over, and over, and over again here on HN. Yes, we all know the quote, and yes it always appears when someone discovers how crap their implementation is). You failed and wasted your time because you didn't consider performance a basic tenet of development, especially on limited mobile devices.
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#5Post-mortem? I don't get it.
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#6From Wikipedia:
"A project post-mortem is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. Project post-mortems are intended to inform process improvements which mitigate future risks and to promote iterative best practices."
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#7From Wikipedia: "A project post-mortem is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. Project post-mortems are intended to inform process improvements which mitigate future risks and to promote iterative best practices."
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Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#8Where's the actual post mortem analysis? I wanted to see a discussion about actual problems encountered developing Tweagle specifically. Instead, this is just another exposition of the generic flames we've all seen done to death. Android apps have lots of screen resolutions (so what did you have to do to manage that?). "Some devices lack WiFi, A-GPS or both." (what is your fallback if the user doesn't have local internet or location services?).
I especially like this one: "Some people “hack” their Google Play app to be able to download incompatible apps and then write 1-star reviews when the app doesn’t work" ... with no discussion about why their app was marked incompatible in the first place.
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#9One of our two full-time developers on the project spent most of his time fighting a never-ending war against our XML views to make the app look just as good on a ZTE Blade as it does on a brand new Galaxy Nexus.
I'm definitely feeling that way these days.
When I first started learning Android, I was very excited about the resource system. The ecosystem is highly fragmented, but they give you the tools to deal with it!, I thought. How cool, I want to learn from their wisdom!
Six months later, I'm actively shopping for a different UI framework. This one makes easy things hard and hard things impossible. I was recently trying to make a button 40% of the screen width and aligned kinda leftish and kept from getting too big on wide screens. In CSS, that's couple lines, maybe thirty seconds. But in Android . . . well, I spent six hours thrashing through documentation and recommendations and opinions on StackOverflow before I gave up and wrote my own Button class.
It's really that bad.
Ever try to change the color of a button on Android? It requires something like fifteen 9-patch PNGs, two or three arcane XML files, and navigating a style hierarchy for your activities. No siree, no .myButton { border: 3 px solid #C88; } here.
Ever try to wrap text on a canvas? Or scale a font based on the display size? Or add an element to a view when a screen is a little bit larger? The hoops you have to jump through are simply amazing.
I'm convinced it's not fragmentation, per se, that's the problem. The web has even more fragmentation, and it handles it well enough. No, it's that the tools you're given for dealing with the fragmentation are so very poor.
Re: Building quality software for Android - A post-mortem for Tweagle
#10An application I'm currently building (shameless plug - www.quaffic.com) will definitely benefit from this post. If nothing else, I feel affirmed that we're on the right track. From what you're saying, the value of ACRA is huge. That's my big takeaway at this point. I wondered what the normal process was for getting crash reports from users. Also, what did you end up doing to alleviate your JSONObject problem? JSONSm…
The article said they use Jackson for parsing json. A great library by the way.