"Knowing what a pleasure it is to use Apple and Google’s tools,"
I haven't used the iOS SDK, but the Android SDK is far from "a pleasure to use". The 3.0 emulator is so unusably slow that it makes it practically impossible for me to adapt my app to the new tablet UI without going insane in the process.
Well, apart from the Honeycomb issues, it is a pleasure to use. If you don't have your phone plugged in and hit Run or Debug, it installs it to the emulator and runs it. If you do have your phone plugged in, it goes there. It's one button for either phone or emulator.
As a side note, I assume it will be this easy with 3.0 as well, so the slow emulator may not be a problem if you have a tablet plugged in. Even with the current emulator, I prefer to just use my phone; it's faster and gives me a better idea of how it really looks and runs.
The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto
Yeah, I'm really hoping that they switch over to x86 for the emulator soon, the way Apple does it. It's not awful for simple apps, but it is genuinely impossible to develop an OpenGL ES application on the Android emulator.
Use a real device, and the whole process is quite painless.
No, because the Android tools were exceptionally easy to install and use. The point of this rant is that RIM's tools are the opposite. Anyone can get used to the tools they're given to accomplish a task, the point here is how easy is it to accomplish said getting-used-to.
Comments
"Knowing what a pleasure it is to use Apple and Google’s tools,"
I haven't used the iOS SDK, but the Android SDK is far from "a pleasure to use". The 3.0 emulator is so unusably slow that it makes it practically impossible for me to adapt my app to the new tablet UI without going insane in the process.
Well, apart from the Honeycomb issues, it is a pleasure to use. If you don't have your phone plugged in and hit Run or Debug, it installs it to the emulator and runs it. If you do have your phone plugged in, it goes there. It's one button for either phone or emulator.
As a side note, I assume it will be this easy with 3.0 as well, so the slow emulator may not be a problem if you have a tablet plugged in. Even with the current emulator, I prefer to just use my phone; it's faster and gives me a better idea of how it really looks and runs.
The Android emulator is a full ARM processor emulator. Very slow and probably always will be. My experience is that Android development is mostly impossible without the real hardware. This Android x86 port looks promising though: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/virtualboxhowto
Yeah, I'm really hoping that they switch over to x86 for the emulator soon, the way Apple does it. It's not awful for simple apps, but it is genuinely impossible to develop an OpenGL ES application on the Android emulator.
Use a real device, and the whole process is quite painless.
I've been using android-x86 for most of my development lately.
But is there a honeycomb variant yet? The best I've been able to do reliably is Froyo.
I haven't done Android dev lately but I wrote a few apps in the 1.5/1.6 days and it was really nice once you got used to the tools.
I'm not sure that's a useful metric. Before you got used to the tools, could have you written a rant like the one in the article?
No, because the Android tools were exceptionally easy to install and use. The point of this rant is that RIM's tools are the opposite. Anyone can get used to the tools they're given to accomplish a task, the point here is how easy is it to accomplish said getting-used-to.