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Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

stuartkhall.com

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#42
post #40
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What setup work? Install Xcode from the App Store, and log in with your developer account? There is less involved than just downloading and unzipping the Android SDK

I'm not sure if it has changed since I last made an ios app a while back, but there was a fairly large amount of security certificate provisioning and the interface for it, at that time at least, was unintuitive.

It has changed. The certificate is created and provisioned to the device automatically by XCode.

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#43
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What setup work? Install Xcode from the App Store, and log in with your developer account? There is less involved than just downloading and unzipping the Android SDK

(ignoring the creating the developer account) - create certificate(s) - create provisioning profile(s) - hit refresh in Xcode and hope it pulls in the profiles you want to use (maybe only an issue if you're a member of multiple teams) - modify build settings once you've done that its simple but there is definitely a setup overhead with Xcode and devices

If you are not a member of multiple teams, this is all unnecessary.

The point is that the original comment is flat out false.

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#44
post #4

"A trick often used by iOS devs is to use the tag of a view to hold lookup information, such as offset in arrays. With Android you can shove the entire object into the tag; pretty useful." Yes, but if it's something like a ListView, don't put offset in array there, because the views are recycled (when user scrols), so you're likely to end up with corrupted data. I got bitten by this in the beginning. You can go to gr…

Often used?

Number of times I have used view tags: Once.

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#45
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(ignoring the creating the developer account) - create certificate(s) - create provisioning profile(s) - hit refresh in Xcode and hope it pulls in the profiles you want to use (maybe only an issue if you're a member of multiple teams) - modify build settings once you've done that its simple but there is definitely a setup overhead with Xcode and devices

If you are not a member of multiple teams, this is all unnecessary. The point is that the original comment is flat out false.

In my experience anything that Xcode promises to just work, just doesn't but yes they have at least improved provisioning.

The original point was that there are steps to go through, and creating a paid developer account is a non trivial step

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not a member of multiple teams, this is all unnecessary. The point is that the original comment is flat out false.

In my experience anything that Xcode promises to just work, just doesn't but yes they have at least improved provisioning. The original point was that there are steps to go through, and creating a paid developer account is a non trivial step

There are steps to go through for android too. The original comment about deployment is false, and doesn't make any distinction about one time setup.

> That's also because deploying an APK on a test device (or several devices) is way easier than deploying an IPA on an iOS device.

False.

> it's easy to push the APK to my phone as part of the build process, and I don't even have to plug my device in to do so.

Also true of iOS.

If you want to make the case that enrolling in the developer program is a hassle, that's fine, but it's misleading to make it sound as though that is part of the build process.

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#47
"Tag A trick often used by iOS devs is to use the tag of a view to hold lookup information, such as offset in arrays. With Android you can shove the entire object into the tag; pretty useful."

No.. Just no. That's considered really bad form. The tag of a view should not be used (Abused) to hold an index etc.. that is linked to the data set.

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#48
post #21

My experience with ListView was... weird. It doesn't ask you for a height for each row like UITableView does, just for a row count. Then, it measures your views as you return them. This meant that the scrollbar was completely unreliable, it would resize based on the height of the currently visible views. Is there an obvious way around this that I'm missing? ListAdapter doesn't have anything for specifying height.

This is by design in Android. It's very computationally heavy to ask for the heights of each ListView item. Unfortunately I wasn't able to dig up my reference to this. :( Two more things: 1. The wormy scrollbar is actually standard on Android: the messaging app does it, IIRC even the twitter app on Android does it. So even though your iOS experience tells you it's weird, any users of yours on Android likely won't not…

> It's very computationally heavy to ask for the heights of each ListView item.

Can you expand on that? Do you mean that it's expensive for the OS for some reason, or do you mean that it's expensive for your (client) code to compute the height of each item?

It seems like in most cases it's a simple method like "return isHeader : HEADER_HEIGHT : ITEM_HEIGHT;"

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#49
post #40
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What setup work? Install Xcode from the App Store, and log in with your developer account? There is less involved than just downloading and unzipping the Android SDK

I'm not sure if it has changed since I last made an ios app a while back, but there was a fairly large amount of security certificate provisioning and the interface for it, at that time at least, was unintuitive.

They is the exact same amount of work involved with Android. iOS is actually significantly easier.

Re: Android Development Tips For iOS Devs

#50
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not a member of multiple teams, this is all unnecessary. The point is that the original comment is flat out false.

In my experience anything that Xcode promises to just work, just doesn't but yes they have at least improved provisioning. The original point was that there are steps to go through, and creating a paid developer account is a non trivial step

You need to create a paid developer account on Android too.
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