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Poll: You and Mobile Development

news.ycombinator.com

41–50 of 61 posts

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#41
post #11
post #3

Kindle

Oh! How is it?

It's not very fun, actually. I've been using Mirah (a simple Ruby-esque language with basic type inference that compiles to Java bytecode without a runtime dependency), so at least I don't have to write Java, but the Kindle framework itself feels very beta. My two apps have been bouncing back and forth with QA for several months---Amazon QA does an amazing and through job (including user testing + feedback), but it is frustrating to work around the framework so often in my application code. For instance, it takes on the order of seconds to load and display an image (not the e-ink display, but actually reading the image into memory). The framework requires that an app starts up in roughly 5 seconds, so I've spent a lot of time spinning up threads to load images in the background. But then you need to make sure these threads are stopped when the app exits (or goes into screensaver), and the framework sometimes calls stop() before start(), &c. &c. Oh, and you can only test this on the hardware itself, because the simulator doesn't emulate the Kindle CPU (it just runs using your system's Java)

To get more of a feel of what you're in for, check out this forum post + Java sample code:

http://forums.kindlecentral.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=...

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#42
I'm blown away by the number of Android developers. I wonder how many of those who voted are just hobby / tinkerers. While looking for experienced mobile devs I have found many great iPhone devs and so few great or even interested Android devs. This poll speaks otherwise.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#43
post #13

Thinking about doing Android-apps. And definitely thinking about exploiting the platforms (current) lack of tablet-optimised apps to make my own stand out.

Yeah, that's exactly where I am. The current lack of Android tablet apps is actually kind of exciting - we're in the calm before the storm, and anyone who puts out a kickass Android tablet app now is in a good position.

Great for a personal project. I would be all over that. Looking at it from a business perspective you can see why there are so few tablet apps in the android market. The amount of android tablets in users hands right now is small. You target a much larger percentage of the market by making an app for mobile handsets. While it might initially appear easy to make the app "just work" on both tablet and handset it is actually a considerable amount of development time (not to mention the often missed design and testing time needed as well).

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#44
Hypothetically, if I were interested in getting in to Android development, but I didn't want to switch to using an Android phone, what would be the most cost-effective way to get my hands on an Android device that would be good for testing? Or is the emulator reliable enough to release without testing on hardware?

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#45
post #42

I'm blown away by the number of Android developers. I wonder how many of those who voted are just hobby / tinkerers. While looking for experienced mobile devs I have found many great iPhone devs and so few great or even interested Android devs. This poll speaks otherwise.

We're about 50/50 with android/iPhone... It used to be everyone wanted iPhone and then eventually some folks would want android... now it's an even break. I think it's just a sign of the times, when you ship more handsets, more folks want software for the platform.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#46

Spending all of my programming time these days doing HTML5 Canvas stuff (work, personal projects, writing tutorials, helping people on StackOverflow, and helping those who email me for help) Canvas is definitely on a slow-but-steady rise in popularity - there are a lot more questions each day on SO than there were a year ago. It's kind of nice to watch it grow, in a way. I picked "Mobile-friendly Web development" tho…

<3 canvas. My team and I developed an HTML5 game over the summer, and we were consistently impressed with how capable hardware-accelerated canvas was of answering our needs.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#47
post #44

Hypothetically, if I were interested in getting in to Android development, but I didn't want to switch to using an Android phone, what would be the most cost-effective way to get my hands on an Android device that would be good for testing? Or is the emulator reliable enough to release without testing on hardware?

THe emulator is awful, even on really good hardware. I use a nexus one, which was the original developer device from Google, I think they have a new one out. Find out which phone is recommended by google.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#49
I develop for iOS and Android using LiveCode ( http://runrev.com ), it is a modern cross-platform HyperCard descendant. It is really powerful and fun to use, not to mention that it can deploy native applications to Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux. Personally I use a MacBook as my main development machine but at home I sometimes use my Fedora 15 desktop. I have LiveCode running in both of them and I deploy to to all systems. Curious people in here might want to check it out.

Re: Poll: You and Mobile Development

#50
post #18

For 5 years now I've been occasionally writing more features for Windows CE based barcode scanners. I wouldn't say that qualifies as "Windows Phone", so I didn't vote for that. Thankfully by now we are more and more replacing these Windows CE things with iphones plus sleeves with barcode scanners which gives us a nicer API and the end user gets a much cooler device to work with. The .NET Compact Framework is a beast:…

Can you point me towards a barcode scanner for iOS devices?
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