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Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

blog.edwinevans.me

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#21

My experiences with Android and iOS dev has been pretty bad. Android has unbelievably crappy tools. Mac iOS dev tools are beautiful and extremely slick, however I couldn't figure them out. Objective-C is a huge blocking issue for me. Recently been using Titanium Mobile which I'm starting to really like. It makes iPhone dev really nice. With Android dev though you still have to deal with the crappy tools provided by G…

"Mac iOS dev tools are beautiful and extremely slick" And yet have features found in SlickEdit circa 1992. Twenty fucking years later I'd expect my IDE to a bit smarter. It might look beautiful (to you) but its brain dead.

Do you have some implementable ideas?

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#22
post #10

Summary: The author is a long-time Windows developer and extremely familiar with Visual Studio. He likes the WP7 development environment best. He can deal with Eclipse for Android, but he finds iOS development with Xcode counterintuitive. I'm not sure the author is really distinguishing between his personal tastes and the actual characteristics of each platform. But his personal tastes are shared by an enormous numbe…

Popularity among corporate developers fits the analysis that WM's main success will be in replacing Blackberries as work-issued phones. Corporations would surely like to have a phone OS that their sysadmins and programmers understand, so they can integrate it well with Exchange and write in-house apps easily.

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#23
post #10

Summary: The author is a long-time Windows developer and extremely familiar with Visual Studio. He likes the WP7 development environment best. He can deal with Eclipse for Android, but he finds iOS development with Xcode counterintuitive. I'm not sure the author is really distinguishing between his personal tastes and the actual characteristics of each platform. But his personal tastes are shared by an enormous numbe…

Popularity among corporate developers fits the analysis that WM's main success will be in replacing Blackberries as work-issued phones. Corporations would surely like to have a phone OS that their sysadmins and programmers understand, so they can integrate it well with Exchange and write in-house apps easily.

Small point perhaps but a place I was working at five years ago was developing in house custom apps for their workforce on the old windows mobile phones (probably 5 or 6? can't remember) but they did it because you could dev in .net and well it did what they needed it to do. That was about 400 devices and they were not cheap back then.

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Mac iOS dev tools are beautiful and extremely slick" And yet have features found in SlickEdit circa 1992. Twenty fucking years later I'd expect my IDE to a bit smarter. It might look beautiful (to you) but its brain dead.

Do you have some implementable ideas?

Absolutely:

http://blog.binaryfinery.com/monotouch-qa

This is written for potential clients, rather than hackers, but I do go a bit deeper into why ObjectiveC sucks near the bottom.

Basically, use good tools. What hacker would create a website without analytics these days? Yet Apple wants us to settle for an editor that is dumb as bricks, when tools like Resharper or Eclipse that can not only analyze our code but refactor it automatically. XCode has 6 refactorings, and all of them will fail to do what you want, or just flat out refuse. Resharper has, I think, 120?

Resharper analyzes my code as I type. I develop iPhone apps on my PC in C# and even before I compile it on the Mac, I know its going to compile because Resharper has been analyzing it the whole time.

There are basically two problems with XCode and Objc and neither of them are solvable:

1) Writing tools for languages that have header files that can be included multiple times, and which require a class to be declared all over the place, is hard.

2) There's a shit load more developers for java, C, C++ and C# than there are for Objective-C. This may change, enough to incentivize groups (companies/oss) to write better tools, but they'll still be years behind groups like jetbrains or eclipse.

Now, C and C++ may be 20+ years old, but they've been in constant use and development that whole time, and by a majority of programmers. Yet even these languages have poor tools (the whole header issue). Objective-C is 20 years old, but with, what, a 15 year hiatus.

So the solution is to say "Why the fuck am I using a 20 year old language that lacks 20 years of tool development" and move on to something thats either a) newer or b) well established. I recommend MonoTouch.

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#26
My main concern with WP7 is that it can run only managed code (see http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsphone7s... for example).

This means that existing non-.NET code has to be rewritten from scratch to be ported to WP7, while on iPhone and Android it is possible to link native code.

If a developer wants to write the same application on iPhone or Android and WP7, basically no code can be shared. Is it worth it?

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#27

>Android is better for being able to develop on your platform of choice (though I suspect developing on Mac is best supported)... Quickly like to point out that Eclipse on OS X is atrocious.

Agreed.

I could never find an IDE for java I liked on OS X. Eclipse is ugly, buggy and crashes every few hours. NetBeans is better, but not by much.

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#29
post #19

IMO the comparison between these platforms is only interesting when you take alternate languages into account. We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind, so how do more advanced languages fare on these platforms?

> We know Java, C#, and Objective C are all way behind (...) Behind what?

Behind the state of the art in language design. Compare C# to F#, or Java to Scala. And that's not even taking into account languages like Haskell, Io, and Clojure that introduce more radical new concepts. (Not that the concepts themselves are new, but they appear radical to Java and C# devs.)

Re: Developing on WP7 vs Android vs iPhone

#30

>Android is better for being able to develop on your platform of choice (though I suspect developing on Mac is best supported)... Quickly like to point out that Eclipse on OS X is atrocious.

When did you last try Eclipse on OS X?

I personally prefer Netbeans over Eclipse and Ubuntu or even Windows over Mac OS X, but Eclipse on Mac has become very usable since about two years ago. (I think there are still some problems with keyboard shortcuts, but I'll blame them mostly on OS X, not Eclipse.)

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