Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pewpewarrows | Hacker News Reader

The author completely missed the boat when it came to testing. You can just plug-in your real Android handset and run/debug applications as you're developing them. Pressing build immediately sends it over the wire, and in seconds you can see how the app runs on a working phone.

I also found it pretty humorous about the statements related to how much you have to download for Android development, when the 3gb monstrosity that is Xcode exists. It does have the advantage of not needing to get anything other than Xcode, whereas with Android you need to fetch three separate things.

Nitpicky issue, but you seemed to use the word "though" and its variations way too often, often multiple times in the same sentence, or right after one another.

Whole-hearted agreement on the Eclipse bloat. Really wish a better open-source IDE would come into existence. I love vim as much as the next guy, but for whole-stack integrated development like Java you really can't beat the speed of coding that an IDE can give you. I've been dabbling in writing a lean, Chrome-like IDE, but I haven't been able to devote nearly enough time to flesh it out into a real project.

Thanks for the comments. You're right that I didn't mention about testing on a device, I will update the post. The reason I talked about the emulator was because most people will only have one, maybe two, devices. They will need to use the emulator to test different screen sizes and memory configurations.

I wasn't complaining about the size of the Android download. It did come across that way so I have removed that line from the post. Thanks for pointing that out.

Regarding my use of 'though'. Sorry. I tend to use that a lot in speech too so it comes across in my writing. I will try to watch that from now on :)

Try IntelliJ community edition. It fully supports Android development with the exception of a visual layout tool and it's 100x better than Eclipse, IMO. In fact, after working with IntelliJ and then going back to XCode it's amazing how little help XCode gives you with managing your code. Admittedly tooling Java is much easier than C/Obj-C/C++ but after using an IDE with really good refactoring tools I really, really miss them in XCode.

I concur.

I started playing with Android over the weekend. Even though I know Eclipse pretty well, Intellij community edition was way better.

Thanks for the suggestions. I didn't even know a community edition of IntelliJ existed.

It does exist, it is open-source and it is awesome.

It also comes with Android project-types. What is missing when compared to Eclipse is the visual interface builder, but IMHO people can do without that bloat, especially since it is totally unusable IMHO.

Just do your interfaces as you would do HTML-stuff. IDEA does give you code completion for tags and tag attributes. Works fine.

Try Eclim, it runs Eclipse in headless mode and connects it to Vim, letting you use the code inspection & analysis of Eclipise within Vim.

I think the free version of intellij has android support.

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