Any Android developers here?

[ElNono]

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 ' o 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 .

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?

[lefty]

Im able to root and flash, so I guess Im a developer


No?



Not even close ?

[baseline bum]

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 ' o 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 .

Should have used my optimized o world son

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...=1#post6494751

[ElNono]

Should have used my optimized o world son

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/show...=1#post6494751

do you do any android dev?

[baseline bum]

do you do any android dev?

Nah bro.... real programmers code in MIXAL with 6-bit bytes.

[Raven]

have you made sure the phone emulator takes as little memory as possible? If i remember correctly, it uses the ram as if it was a hard disk, making your overall memory a lot smaller. I had the same problem in the beginning, then made the memory as small as i could and it worked a lot faster. Still no assembly code speed, but i was able to digest the time tbh.

[ElNono]

have you made sure the phone emulator takes as little memory as possible? If i remember correctly, it uses the ram as if it was a hard disk, making your overall memory a lot smaller. I had the same problem in the beginning, then made the memory as small as i could and it worked a lot faster. Still no assembly code speed, but i was able to digest the time tbh.

Thanks. I'll give it a shot.

[DJ Mbenga]

i cant even root a htc desire hd. like im literally lost.
i used to be able to do crazy . thats what i get for going to wp7

[lefty]

^
HTC All in One toolkit

[anakha]

^
HTC All in One toolkit

Just make sure you know exactly what's happening when you use it though.

I've known a few people that had something go wrong when running toolkits and were stuck not knowing what to do next because they never bothered to understand what the toolkit was doing.

[lefty]

Just make sure you know exactly what's happening when you use it though.

I've known a few people that had something go wrong when running toolkits and were stuck not knowing what to do next because they never bothered to understand what the toolkit was doing.

Yup

I did a lot of research (wtf is a bootloader, recovery, kernel, bootloop, fruitloop) and also watched the step by step video on YT

[DJ Mbenga]

Yup

I did a lot of research (wtf is a bootloader, recovery, kernel, bootloop, fruitloop) and also watched the step by step video on YT

unfortunately one the tools used for this has been discontinued and its jsut ign complicated. unlocking bootloader but using commands then this whole s off s on .
when i rooted my old android phone it was just one click, load rom.

[lefty]

unfortunately one the tools used for this has been discontinued and its jsut ign complicated. unlocking bootloader but using commands then this whole s off s on .
when i rooted my old android phone it was just one click, load rom.

yup

I love HTC phones but my next phone is gonna be a Nexus or a Sammy

Not a huge fan of Sammys, but they are easier to root TBH

[anakha]

yup

I love HTC phones but my next phone is gonna be a Nexus or a Sammy

Not a huge fan of Sammys, but they are easier to root TBH

Well, if this new trend of releasing "Google Experience" versions of flagships keeps occurring, you could have the best of both worlds.

not living in the US and not being able to take advantage of this .

[lefty]

Well, if this new trend of releasing "Google Experience" versions of flagships keeps occurring, you could have the best of both worlds.

not living in the US and not being able to take advantage of this .

bah

Google experience or not, there is good chance I'm gonna root those es anyway

But again, if I'm happy with the features and the OS updates, I may not root