Posts Tagged ‘android’

I’m considering switching back to iOS. Here’s why.

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

In September of last year I ditched my iPhone 3G and switched to the Android-powered HTC Desire (which I later sold in order to purchase a Desire Z, which sports a physical keyboard.) I’m sad to report that I’m now considering switching back to iOS, after less than a year on the Android platform.  The following is an excerpt from an e-mail I wrote to a friend of mine whom I’d describe as a fervent Android evangelist, detailing some of the frustrations I have with the operating system and why I feel that I might be better served by iOS.  I’ve edited it slightly to make it more readable for anyone who might come across this blog.

I really want to like the Android platform, and writing this gave me no joy. There are two reasons I’m posting it here, though. The first is simply that the purpose of this website is for me to post about my programming and my experiences with technology (as well as whatever else catches my fancy.) The second is that I hope that sharing my honest opinion about Android might be helpful to anyone considering a phone purchase.

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Android UI/UX gripes

Saturday, April 16th, 2011

The week before last, whilst browsing Reddit I came across a blog by the name of “Android Gripes.” The name is perhaps a bit misleading, as it’s not actually a blog by an Android user hoping to spur Google into making UI improvements, as I would have expected. It is, rather, a blog by a self-proclaimed Apple fanboy (though he’s recently edited his about page to remove that admission) complaining about Android for the sake of… well, complaining about Android. (more…)

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Android NDK Stack Trace Script

Saturday, April 9th, 2011

I’ve finally started doing some Android development in earnest, and because I have a stubborn dislike of Java, I’ve decided to use the Native Development Kit. The native development kit allows you to write “performance-critical” parts of your application in C or C++ code, which is then compiled to platform-native ARM or MIPS instructions. The NDK is something of an unfriendly beast; it makes interaction with most regular Android libraries very difficult, and debugging native code on Android is none too easy. Although Google provides a script which can attach gdb to your native code, I’ve not yet figured out how to use it properly; every time I execute it, gdb complains about missing debugging symbols and libraries and seems to be unable to do anything useful. (I don’t imagine it’s too difficult, but I haven’t spent much time on it—I’ve not needed to do much debugging yet.) (more…)

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Android Development Device Setup in Ubuntu 10.04

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

I spent part of last night setting up my HTC Desire as a development device on my Ubuntu laptop.  This was a somewhat frustrating process, because a lot of the information I came across seem to be outdated and didn’t work for me.  Even the official documentation refers to a version of Ubuntu which is more than two years old.  I did eventually piece together the correct process for Ubuntu 10.04, so I’m documenting that process here in the hope that it will help out other developers in the future.  This guide assumes that you’ve already installed and configured the Android SDK. (more…)

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Android First Impressions

Monday, September 6th, 2010

Like a number of disgruntled users and developers, I recently decided to trade my iPhone in for an Android device. My distaste for Apple’s app store policies, design philosophy and corporate culture had been pushing me in that direction for some time.  The final straw, though, was iOS 4, which rendered my iPhone 3G almost unusably slow while failing to grant any of the most noteworthy new features. The inordinate difficulty of downgrading iOS exacerbates the problem for users who are still stuck with the iPhone 3G.  To be fair to Apple, Wednesday will see iOS 4.1 released, and they’ve claimed that it will fix the iPhone 3G performance issues.  For me, though, 4.1 is too little, too late. (more…)

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