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Haven't tried programming Android, but not crazy about objective c. But Apple's documentation is stellar and easy to access.
Agreed. I have no love for Apple and I'm developing directly on my jailbroken iPhone through SSH and even then the documentation is very useful.
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I'd love to hear a good java book recomendation. Is there a K&R kind of book for java? I also have to say that maybe iOS is bit easier to get started with but have the author come talk to me after doing ten or twenty apps wrangling core data, list view, sprites, physics engines, universal apps and mixing c c++ and objectice-c and tell me that rabbit hole is not pretty damn deep.
Hortsman & Cornell's, two volume "Core Java 1.2". I only read the first. Gosling's "The Java Programming Language". And Josh Bloch's "Effective Java". After that, Java Concurrency in Practice. Langr's "Agile Java" is good for just that. Bloch, Goetz, and Doug Lea have each written excellent books on java concurrency. That's just about all the java books I would want to recommend. Many j-books are trash.
Well that's not true, the other thing I know for sure is Objective C makes me dry heave.
Counterpoint: I just began developing my first Android app a few days ago, a turn-based strategy game. I've only had an Android device for a month or so so the platform is relatively new to me, and I didn't even know Java (although, to be fair, I knew C# fairly well a couple years ago, which is arguably the same thing plus type inference.) In a few days, with relatively few problems, I was able to build an app and I'…
Just a word of advice on Android, polish your app really well before launch. The Android Market comment system is relentless. If you don't have a smashingly nice app out of the gate, you'll probably get a couple 1-star "sucks"/"rubbish" reviews before you can finish your post-launch exhale.
If the Android Market punishes people that do this then I think that's a very real problem with the market that will directly lead to poorer quality software.
My problem with Android development is that, being a non-Java developer, I never knew when to use the Android SDK or the Java SDK or the Apache stuff for certain tasks. For example, networking. Googling online for solutions, I don't know if any of the Java code I find is Android compatible.
I'm a Java developer and I don't know, either. I suspect the expertise you're looking for might be described as an "Android developer" ;)
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Just a word of advice on Android, polish your app really well before launch. The Android Market comment system is relentless. If you don't have a smashingly nice app out of the gate, you'll probably get a couple 1-star "sucks"/"rubbish" reviews before you can finish your post-launch exhale.
This is interesting because I, having no knowledge of the Android market but a lot of knowledge of development in general, would give the exact opposite advice! In general I think it's agreed that the best thing to do is release, and then tweak. If the Android Market punishes people that do this then I think that's a very real problem with the market that will directly lead to poorer quality software.
Mobile apps are a lot more like movies. Opening weekend means a LOT. If you are weak out the gate, you'll have bad reviews. When you update, no one will care, because not many people will buy the updated app because of all the one-star reviews.
The only time this doesn't apply is if you a huge built in userbase like Facebook, where even with bad reviews, people will still get the updated version of the app.
Counterpoint: I just began developing my first Android app a few days ago, a turn-based strategy game. I've only had an Android device for a month or so so the platform is relatively new to me, and I didn't even know Java (although, to be fair, I knew C# fairly well a couple years ago, which is arguably the same thing plus type inference.) In a few days, with relatively few problems, I was able to build an app and I'…
Once you know Cocoa and Xcode iOS development is faster and more fun than Android development but it's no small learning curve. It's worth it for the fast turnaround of using the simulator compared to Android where both the emulator and device are slow, you're looking at 5-10x as long to launch your app compared to the iOS simulator. Plus ObjC > Java if you ask me, but I'm a masochist who likes both C and dynamic languages. Individual statements are verbose in Cocoa but I'd have to look at how much boilerplate is caused by the Java straight jacket to speculate on which is ultimately more verbose.
You also have to be willing to put with some crusty stuff. Nothing compared to OS X programming but it still feels old next to Java's APIs. Two good examples are string manipulation and interacting w/ the filesystem, so verbose on iOS but pretty good in Java.
That's confusing to me. Message passing is one of the simplest actionable metaphors we have in the world of programming. I'm new to android development, but they seemed pretty straightforward to me.