ElNono
06-12-2013, 02:41 AM
I just finished a project for Win 8 (Win App Store app), and while developing for it had a bit of a learning curve (my first project on win8/csharp/xaml), overall, it was great.
Visual Studio has come a long way since I last looked at it. Having the designer built-in instead of having to switch to Blend was also real nice. I thought it was starting to lag to XCode in features over time, but Microsoft really stepped up their game on the 2012 edition, and basically made up a lot of the lost ground (that said, just looked at XCode 5, and it's kick ass).
Since csharp is pretty close to a no-shame copy of java in many aspects, I figured I would revisit the current state of Android development, with the idea of perhaps migrating at least our top app there too. We've had some requests for it over time.
Last time I checked, Eclipse was the IDE, and was basically terrible. Slow, ugly, counter-intuitive, poor integration, abuse of plug-in architecture, etc . It doesn't help you have to run external tools/plugins for almost everything: Android SDK Manager, ADB, etc. But what really sucked was the Android simulator. Took 10 mins to boot up. I mean, that's not serious. Even if you left it running, it would suck up memory on your machine. Wanna try a different device configuration? You gotta boot it again...
I noticed Google pretty much agreed, and now introduced Android Studio. I checked the current pre-release version out, and much to my dismay, it's another Java-based IDE, a somewhat of an improvement over Eclipse, but still fairly slow. Compilation of a 'hello world' program can take from 30 secs to a minute... and there it is, the simulator again, taking 10 mins to start. I tried enabling hardware VT acceleration, GPU, etc, to no avail. That thing is slow as hell.
So, if there any android devs in here, what do you use to write stuff for Android that doesn't make your i5 look like a commodore 64? Any semi-professional looking IDE that has integrated code analysis tools, a decent layout, and you don't have to access 50% of the features from a plug-in menu? I just can't believe it's so painful to write for this platform. I looked at the Mono for Android stuff. I like you can use Visual Studio with it, but there's no way I'm paying a yearly subscription fee for somebody else's tools. I mean, Xcode is free, Visual Studio Express is free. Is there anything out there that you can use to write apps efficiently?
Visual Studio has come a long way since I last looked at it. Having the designer built-in instead of having to switch to Blend was also real nice. I thought it was starting to lag to XCode in features over time, but Microsoft really stepped up their game on the 2012 edition, and basically made up a lot of the lost ground (that said, just looked at XCode 5, and it's kick ass).
Since csharp is pretty close to a no-shame copy of java in many aspects, I figured I would revisit the current state of Android development, with the idea of perhaps migrating at least our top app there too. We've had some requests for it over time.
Last time I checked, Eclipse was the IDE, and was basically terrible. Slow, ugly, counter-intuitive, poor integration, abuse of plug-in architecture, etc . It doesn't help you have to run external tools/plugins for almost everything: Android SDK Manager, ADB, etc. But what really sucked was the Android simulator. Took 10 mins to boot up. I mean, that's not serious. Even if you left it running, it would suck up memory on your machine. Wanna try a different device configuration? You gotta boot it again...
I noticed Google pretty much agreed, and now introduced Android Studio. I checked the current pre-release version out, and much to my dismay, it's another Java-based IDE, a somewhat of an improvement over Eclipse, but still fairly slow. Compilation of a 'hello world' program can take from 30 secs to a minute... and there it is, the simulator again, taking 10 mins to start. I tried enabling hardware VT acceleration, GPU, etc, to no avail. That thing is slow as hell.
So, if there any android devs in here, what do you use to write stuff for Android that doesn't make your i5 look like a commodore 64? Any semi-professional looking IDE that has integrated code analysis tools, a decent layout, and you don't have to access 50% of the features from a plug-in menu? I just can't believe it's so painful to write for this platform. I looked at the Mono for Android stuff. I like you can use Visual Studio with it, but there's no way I'm paying a yearly subscription fee for somebody else's tools. I mean, Xcode is free, Visual Studio Express is free. Is there anything out there that you can use to write apps efficiently?