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grandM

macrumors 68000
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Oct 14, 2013
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This might seem a bit of a strange question. However I went through several courses which combined iOS and swift. When it comes down to android/java I get the distinct impression you would better first learn java before looking at android. Also the way android enables the layout of its screen without a decent IB seems horrible. Am I mistaken, does somebody know of a book elegantly combining android and java? Thanks
 
This might seem a bit of a strange question. However I went through several courses which combined iOS and swift. When it comes down to android/java I get the distinct impression you would better first learn java before looking at android. Also the way android enables the layout of its screen without a decent IB seems horrible. Am I mistaken, does somebody know of a book elegantly combining android and java? Thanks
Unless Android has changed, they don't have anything to offer that compares to IB and I don't know if they have a size class like iOS does.

Android has always been far behind Apple in terms of IDE tools. I've heard that they are buggy and slow as well.

One other issue with Android is all the different devices and so many versions of the OS being used.

Learning the basics of a language would help a bit, but in reality, you are learning many things at the same time just as with iOS. So I don't see a big advantage for digging too deep into Java before jumping into the Android mobile dev system.

Clearly the Android devs have found a way to make things work, before you get too deep, I'd check and see what the popular tools are. When I did it, it was eclipse but that was years ago. I'd guess someone has come up with some aftermarket tools by now.
 
Android Studio is pretty good.

As an IDE, I still prefer Xcode, though its shortcomings have been wearing thin just a bit more to me every passing day.
 
If you're not familiar with Java then learn some Java before learning Android.

Android Studio is the recommended IDE for Java development these days. It's a version of IntelliJ, which is a commercial Java IDE. I like it and definitely like it better than Eclipse. Android Studio does have some ability to edit UI in a GUI way. Android UI is based on XML configurations and you may end up doing some hand editing of those files. Android devices come in many screen sizes. Android has a way to have different layouts for different screen sizes and of course this method is not like the way iOS does it.

You can do all your Android development on a Mac. You'll want to have an Android device because the Android emulator is very slow.
 
Thanks! I'm glad to hear it's been improved. I'll have to check out Android Studio as I'm sure I won't be able to ignore Android forever :D

I wonder, did they ever fix the issue where someone can re-sign your app? I understand someone could take your app and edit it in such a way that it looked like they owned it.

I remember the old days when someone had a anti-decompile product that would mix things up such that you really couldn't decompile it.
 
If you're not familiar with Java then learn some Java before learning Android.

Android Studio is the recommended IDE for Java development these days. It's a version of IntelliJ, which is a commercial Java IDE. I like it and definitely like it better than Eclipse. Android Studio does have some ability to edit UI in a GUI way. Android UI is based on XML configurations and you may end up doing some hand editing of those files. Android devices come in many screen sizes. Android has a way to have different layouts for different screen sizes and of course this method is not like the way iOS does it.

You can do all your Android development on a Mac. You'll want to have an Android device because the Android emulator is very slow.
Is android studio the same on mac as pc?

Thanks! I'm glad to hear it's been improved. I'll have to check out Android Studio as I'm sure I won't be able to ignore Android forever :D

I wonder, did they ever fix the issue where someone can re-sign your app? I understand someone could take your app and edit it in such a way that it looked like they owned it.

I remember the old days when someone had a anti-decompile product that would mix things up such that you really couldn't decompile it.
lol so they rock at security
 
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Is android studio the same on mac as pc?

Yes. Android Studio and associated tools are Java-based. You'll need to install some open source products on your Mac, like a recent version of Java, but AS is Java and will run on Mac, Win, Linux and probably others. There may be different installers for different hosts but the app is the same on all platforms.
 
does somebody know of a book elegantly combining android and java? Made for noobs in java
 
The worst possible thing that a new software developer can do is try to learn too many things at one time.

If you're a new developer, I would recommend either sticking solely with iOS or sticking solely with Android while you learn development. But trying to learn both at the same time is going to be an extremely slow and frustrating process and you will probably give up. It is far easier to learn Android development as a knowledgeable iOS developer, and visa versa. So if you just stick with iOS development for a while and try to get some good experience, you will probably learn both platforms better than if you had started trying to learn both. You will definitely waste a lot less time with confusion and things like that.
 
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There's likely to be a lot of unhappiness/frustrations with whatever your secondary, follow up platform, is regardless of which you start with.
 
Can you share some examples?
Xcode Autocomplete is pretty awful, it's especially bad with Swift. When you type 'if' in Objective C it automatically fills out the brackets and moves your cursor to the conditional statement, but not with Swift. It's actually so awful and useless that I'm considering turning it off entirely. Autocomplete was bad enough with Objective-C, but in swift it's utterly useless.

There's also a lot of bugs with IB not recognizing the subclass you've connected it to.

Worst of all is the ridiculous provisioning profile system. I've spent countless hours simply troubleshooting some obscure and arcane provisioning issue. It's especially confusing to beginners, I've noticed.
 
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Can you share some examples?

Oh I could rip. I probably spend >9 hour a day in Xcode, so it and I have gotten very intimate.

My personal favorite is the dragging of multiple images, non-vectors, into a folder in an image xcasset, then manually moving each of them to the universal 2x space (because, you know, defaulting to the 1x space when there are no devices in production is genius) only to have them revert back into the unassigned space at the very end. Doesn't always happen, but it happens every time I work with image sequence animations. Every. Damn. Time.

OR my second favorite: Completely broken subclass generation for object models. Completely broken. Two years. You knew something was odd when they never fixed the auto generated NSOrderedSet ancestors, but then Swift introduced namespacing along side the requirement de-bonding your model for extensions and that just absolutely blew sh*t up and Xcode just can't.

Then there's the smaller things, like the syntax highlighter spazzing out, then crashing, over a broken code because you haven't finished typing a for loop (fun fact, for loop is being removed from Swift in favor of for-in!). The inability to actually scroll in and out of storyboards without extreme resistance. It's non-obvious handling of errors between targets. The weird build loop locking...

But I've worked with worse. It just sucks that they provide such intense tools that can be phenomenal when they work, but hinder development when they don't. If I were to rate it, I'd give it a 2.5 out of 5.
 
Xcode Autocomplete is pretty awful, it's especially bad with Swift. When you type 'if' in Objective C it automatically fills out the brackets and moves your cursor to the conditional statement, but not with Swift. It's actually so awful and useless that I'm considering turning it off entirely. Autocomplete was bad enough with Objective-C, but in swift it's utterly useless.

There's also a lot of bugs with IB not recognizing the subclass you've connected it to.

Worst of all is the ridiculous provisioning profile system. I've spent countless hours simply troubleshooting some obscure and arcane provisioning issue. It's especially confusing to beginners, I've noticed.
+1 on the provisioning system. I don't know if it's changed over the last few years or not, because I don't test on devices anymore at this point, but it was a pain.

You'd think Apple would make it more seamless by now.

Clearly Apple has a different standard between consumer product and developer products as far as fit and finish is concerned.
 
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Oh I could rip. I probably spend >9 hour a day in Xcode, so it and I have gotten very intimate.

My personal favorite is the dragging of multiple images, non-vectors, into a folder in an image xcasset, then manually moving each of them to the universal 2x space (because, you know, defaulting to the 1x space when there are no devices in production is genius) only to have them revert back into the unassigned space at the very end. Doesn't always happen, but it happens every time I work with image sequence animations. Every. Damn. Time.

OR my second favorite: Completely broken subclass generation for object models. Completely broken. Two years. You knew something was odd when they never fixed the auto generated NSOrderedSet ancestors, but then Swift introduced namespacing along side the requirement de-bonding your model for extensions and that just absolutely blew sh*t up and Xcode just can't.

Then there's the smaller things, like the syntax highlighter spazzing out, then crashing, over a broken code because you haven't finished typing a for loop (fun fact, for loop is being removed from Swift in favor of for-in!). The inability to actually scroll in and out of storyboards without extreme resistance. It's non-obvious handling of errors between targets. The weird build loop locking...

But I've worked with worse. It just sucks that they provide such intense tools that can be phenomenal when they work, but hinder development when they don't. If I were to rate it, I'd give it a 2.5 out of 5.
Great, something to look forward to :D

Maybe we should have a sticky for known bugs for those that don't know all the bugs and have the workarounds.

Mod? Can we get a known bugs sticky for Xcode/Swift?
 
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