Mobile Development day 3: Android

OK, so today was the penultimate day for  "getting started" types of mobile development workshops. Today's topic, as you might surmise from the title, was Android development.  Today's development environment was Eclipse with the Android SDK.  The nice thing about Android development is that it is all XML and Java, which is pretty nice. I am familiar with XML and I did do Java as part of my computer science BA way back when.  Today the Computer Science curriculum at UMass Boston does use Eclipse as the IDE (integrated development environment), but back when I was in intro to computer science we used TELNET over a 56k modem (eeeek!) to connect to a terminal, use EMACS and compile something with javac which ran in the terminal; thus text-only, no GUI.

Having seen XCode and Visual Studio 2010 in earlier "getting started" workshops, I have to say that both Xcode and Visual Studio win over Eclipse.  They both seemed snappier, compared to eclipse; they both also came with MUCH better simulators of the iOS and Windows Phone 7 environment respectively. Getting the simulator to run in Eclipse was a major pain - not because it was hard, but because it was so slow!  It felt like I was trying to run Windows 7, under Virtual PC on my PowerBook G4- slow as molasses, even before you added in the app that you wanted to debug!  The other sticky issue with Android is fragmentation. While there are some guidelines to work on, as far as screen resolution goes, the various skins that manufacturers put on their android devices, like MotoBlur, HTC's SenseUI and SonyEricsson's whateverYouCallIt, make it not that easy to design an interface that will be consistent throughout the android experience.  Even when you download the specific phone definitions for the simulator you don't get a realistic feel because the phone definitions don't include those skins.

A buddy of mine (@rjzii) mentioned that when you get used to Eclipse and an IDE it's not bad, but from a 30,000 ft. view, XCode and Visual Studio seem more time saving for the developer.  Hmmm....time to think about which OS I will devote some of my spare time to get back to the programming wagon...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more