Android

[Adiktuz]

Does anybody here develop for android (using Java)?

I'm downloading the SDKs coz I wanna try it out...

 

[Grey Nightmare]

Nope, I've always meant to try it out though.
There are no end to tutorials and the like online, so you're in good hands.

What sort of app are you thinking of developing?

 

[Cokemonkey11]

Yeah I built an application as part of a software engineering course this year. It's pretty powerful and fun too.

 

[Adiktuz]

@Grey - nothing specific for now, but probably something that will be useful...

@Coke - oh I see...

Btw, what do you guys use to make android apps?

 

[Dr Super Good]

At university I saw people using Eclipse with some android development plugin.

 

[Cokemonkey11]

You can use Eclipse with the android development plugin, but there's actually a new option http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html

 

[Adiktuz]

I'm trying IntelliJ, but it seems to work really slow... gonna try eclipse I guess

 

[TriggerHappy]

I'm trying IntelliJ, but it seems to work really slow... gonna try eclipse I guess

I would use eclipse, I think it's officially supported.

You can also download multiple SDK's to develop for various versions. It comes with an emulator too.

 

[Kanadaj]

Yeah I built an application as part of a software engineering course this year. It's pretty powerful and fun too.

Powerful my a**, start up Eclipse with ADT and watch it burn your RAM xD starts out with 700MB, leaks so much it builds up like 2GB by the end of the day (needs at least 3-4 restarts over an 8 hour session)... Emulator is slow as hell (and the current HAXM causes both Windows and Mac to go BSOD, so no x86 emulator, unless you install it on VMWare (only tablet OS can be found as x86 iso though)... But both need Hyper-V to be disabled, so no Windows Phone 8 emulator for you while doing that, and Hyper-V hates Android and turning it on and off needs come command line / registry messing and a reboot).

And when it comes to the designer, things sometimes turn out to be extremely awkward, especially if you use a listview or a viewflipper :/

Also there are bugs like Eclipse importing R into your code, making you unable to export the apk. Or like getting a random corruption so you have to backup your entire workspace, delete it, make a new one and import your workspace data.

So, it's a cheap platform, prepare to face the downsides of being cheap -.-

Android Studio looks better, didn't have too much time with it though. But Eclipse is annoying and slow, plus there are other annoying things. From a developer's view, WP and iOS are waaaay better than Android.

So in short, I don't really like it, but I only get Android jobs

There is also a Native Developer Kit for Android and Visual Studio if you want to work with C++.

 

[Adiktuz]

I nosebleed at C++, that's not a choice for me...

haven't got to try eclipse yet... Android Studio is still not on full release right? IntelliJ IDEA is also SO SLOW AS HELL + I CANT EVEN TEST THE 4.4 kit, it shows a path error even on the sample apps...

 

[Dr Super Good]

Powerful my a**, start up Eclipse with ADT and watch it burn your RAM xD starts out with 700MB, leaks so much it builds up like 2GB by the end of the day (needs at least 3-4 restarts over an 8 hour session)...

This feat alone is pretty impressive seeing how Eclipse is mostly coded in Java so should not be able to leak. The big question I would ask is why it has a working set that grows, what does it do with all that memory? I mean if it was a memory leak, you could just keep using it until the process crashes due to OOM as it would page the leaked pages out since they are not part of the active set. Any slowness you experience would be then be caused by it removing your file cache, which reveals the slowness of your backing storage configuration.

 

[Kanadaj]

Yea but as the memory size grows, for some reason, my computer also becomes really slow (well this is generally true, as I go over 5GB out of 6, things become rather slow)

Also it's true that it shouldn't leak memory, but it does :/ And not just for me, either.

 

[GhostWolf]

My experiences with Eclipse have been that it's decent (if heavy) for Java, crappy for anything else.
And yes, developing Android programs on it is pretty terrible.

 

[Cokemonkey11]

I built an app that supports 2.x -> 4.4, with 6 activities, search support, settings, 3 XML parsers, resource fetching, and asset management in about 30 hours. Never had any issues with eclipse, the AVD, or the SDK.

My emulator launches in about 30 seconds, eclipse in about 15. Never noticed any loss of performance either, and I often left them running while I played games, etc.

I find python in eclipse to also be quite nice.