Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective • Hacker News Board

Re: Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective

#81

Post by mickdj » Wed, Dec 08, 2010, 11:33 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #74

"even now when I show Whereoscope on Android to iPhone users, I need to explain the basics of navigating an Android phone to them before they can use it." I just can't let this stand. I have an iPod Touch and an Android, and I struggle a lot with the iPod Touch. Even making the MP3 player (iTunes?) do what I want is a challenge, and that is a native Apple app. I also had a lot of problems with iPad apps when I tried…

Actually we started off with that - having the same interface for both Android and iOS.

But Android users don't expect Android apps to behave like iPhone apps - so the affordances don't carry over.

They kept tapping the context menu, or holding down list items: actions which are normal on Android but nonexistent on iOS.

Re: Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective

#82

Post by tomh- » Thu, Dec 09, 2010, 11:54 AM UTC

jawngee wrote: post #29

I'm stumped why memory management is so hard for developers, to the point I have to raise an eyebrow every time I read it. Are you seriously that lazy? The docs about it are fairly straight forward: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/... Instruments makes it exceedingly simple to track down leaks. While the iPhone 4 could probably handle a GC in most cases, the iPad less capable. XCode is a p…

Angry Birds on the Galaxy Tab runs smooth as hell. It runs better than my Angry Birds at my ipod touch..have you actually tried it on the Galaxy Tab recently?

Re: Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective

#83

Post by jimrandomh » Thu, Dec 09, 2010, 1:50 PM UTC

ericd wrote: post #6

The shoddy state of the simulator really irks me on Android - it's really necessary that it works well, because there are so many different models of phone. The Android version of my app apparently has a crash-on-startup bug on a single type of Android phone (Droid X), shows up as windowed in others, and works just great on the Nexus/Droid I've tried it on. I can't test on all that physical hardware, though, and the…

Do you have a debugger attached? I've found that Android's emulator is a bit slow, but not unreasonable; but then attaching Eclipse's debugger slows it down by two extra orders of magnitude, which makes it unusable,

Re: Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective

#84

Post by mirkules » Thu, Dec 09, 2010, 11:23 PM UTC

biafra wrote: post #66

mirkules wrote: post #62

The feeling you get with XCode is that it slows you down. I'm a java developer by day, iPhone dev by night. Eclipse/Java are _light years_ ahead of XCode/Objective-C. My gripes with XCode include everything from the build process, the awkward debugger, Interface Builder, and all the way down to little minutiae like key bindings that just don't make sense (try selecting a block to indent it, every other IDE in the wor…

+1 on the IDE stuff of your comment. But Objective-C is a really nice OO language. It seems you do not get its dynamic nature. Yes, its different, but by no means inferior. And yes, tooling is much better for static languages like Java.

You may be right that I don't get Objective-C. I understand that you're not actually calling methods on objects, but instead passing messages to it. What I don't get is why the IDE and the compiler accept invalid method (message) signatures. For example, if you tried [[UIView alloc] mymethod], XCode won't say anything (unlike Eclipse which would catch that mymethod does not exist), and if you try compiling it, you will only get a warning: "UIView may not respond to mymethod". On top of that, XCode won't always display that warning, so you can run into some serious trouble.

Even if XCode were consistent, suppose you are working with some frameworks (like OpenFeint) which, when compiled in your code, have a couple of warnings here and there. How do you tell your warnings from theirs?

More importantly, calling a method (or passing a message) with an incorrect signature should absolutely be a compile-time error.

I'm not trying to be facetious here, I really do run into these problems. I'm genuinely asking why Objective-C and XCode should be considered on equal footing as some other languages?

(P.S. I'm really fired about XCode and Obj-C because I work with it almost daily and these things bother me to no end, so hopefully you're not interpreting my passion for wanting to improve these tools as smugness or arrogance directed at you)

Re: Android vs iOS: A Developer's Perspective

#85

Post by mirkules » Thu, Dec 09, 2010, 11:37 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #64

mirkules wrote: post #62

The feeling you get with XCode is that it slows you down. I'm a java developer by day, iPhone dev by night. Eclipse/Java are _light years_ ahead of XCode/Objective-C. My gripes with XCode include everything from the build process, the awkward debugger, Interface Builder, and all the way down to little minutiae like key bindings that just don't make sense (try selecting a block to indent it, every other IDE in the wor…

every other IDE in the world uses tab, XCode uses Cmd-] wtf? Textmate uses ⌘[, skEdit uses ⌘[, CSSEdit uses ⌘[, Coda uses ⌘[, BBEdit uses ⌘[. Objective-C for me personally is probably the second language by elegance after Ruby.

Sure, but as counter-examples, take Eclipse, Visual Studio, Netbeans, Notepad++, Textpad, XMLSpy...

From your example, it's apparent that Mac-only editors use cmd-[. This is a great idea as it promotes cross-platform compatibility and makes life so much easier for developers. /snark

Likewise, I have a problem with Visual Studio and Eclipse, and their debuggers: F6 is step-over in Eclipse, and F11 is step-over in Visual Studio.

By the way, try using the Visual Studio debugger in a virtual machine on OS X. Another example of an awesome key-binding in OS X (who uses F11 anyway? Let's assign it to something system-wide!)