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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

I love these compare-and-contrast articles about developing on different smartphone platforms, but I'm interested to see how the second-tier ones go, as well. I've heard that webOS is a delight to develop on, WinPho is bad, and I'm not sure about Blackberry OS or the other lower-tier ones.

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I'm doing Winphone dev right now, so hopefully I can share some insight into it. It's not necessarily bad, it's just restrictive. The APIs right now for silverlight applications on the winphone (the primary development framework, the other being XNA) are pretty sparse. If you want to do something outside of the scope of what silverlight provides, then you're going to be flustered. That said, the WYSWYG (expression blend) editor for animations and basic app construction is the best out there in my experience. On android and iphone I typically just wrote front end by hand. While the drag and drop functionality in xcode was very nice, I felt restricted by it. Eclipse's WYSWYG editor feels like an afterthought rather than a primary feature.

Now keep in mind, I'm a vim guy. I'm by no means a fan of WYSWYG editors, but winphone's one is actually quite helpful. It makes sense though - silverlight was Microsoft's solution to flash, so they built a program that followed the same nonlinear editing model that Flash does. It wasn't a framework that they built for a phone, it was a phone that used an existing framework - and that's the reason for all of it's pros and cons.

> On android and iphone I typically just wrote front end by hand. While the drag and drop functionality in xcode was very nice, I felt restricted by it.

Those two are actually very different actions in Cocoa development. From what I remember, when you use drag and drop to create objects, those objects are actually created and serialized when you save the interface file. Creating the front end in code is a very different process in comparison. I have to agree that creating iOS UIs using the Interface Builder portion does feel restrictive at first, but it's actually an amazing tool for creating and using standard UI elements.

There was an interesting talk at I/O that focused largely on the Eclipse WYSIWYG tools that I was watching earlier. Having mostly done my best to ignore them before now, the tools are looking in a much better shape than they once were.

http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/android-develo...

Reminds me of webos in the earlier days.

I've been developing for mobile for nearly ten years and trust me when I say unless you need to support a particular device avoid the legacy platforms, at least until you have a proven mass market app.

J2ME is Micro Edition for a reason, much of the seemingly simple on other platforms you will have to roll yourself and test everywhere.

BB dev is like swimming through treacle or as one of my colleagues put it "death by a thousand paper cuts without the relief of death at the end".

WebOS is a pleasure for web developers, but when you try and make custom UIs or deviate from the framework it can become a pain quickly

Symbian is thankfully a footnote now

>> WinPho is bad

Win Phone is fantastic but incomplete. I.e. not all the api's are there but the bits that are there work well.

I haven't used the latest xcode, but when I was developing for iPhone (2-3 years ago), it was god awful.

I haven't done android dev yet but the feedback I get from friends doing it on Windows is that it is a major PITA getting set up. ..

Xcode has taken a big step forward with version 4. It still has some teething troubles (it seems to get sluggish after about six hours of being open, at least on my machine), but features like code completion actually work now. Most of the time, anyway. :)

BB is sort of like programming in 1999. You've got an ancient JVM version, so you can't use very many 3rd party libraries. The default widgets are completely style-free so any chroming you want to add is a custom job. Even persistence becomes tricky as java.io.File isn't available.

On the pro side, APIs tend to be more straightforward compared to Android. One benefit is that you can write much of your code in a synchronous style without callbacks or risking the dreaded ANR (Activity Not Responding) exception. Just don't expect to reuse a lot of your code without major modification.

>WinPho is bad

What made you think WinPho is bad? Just curious.

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