Building the same app for iOS and Android | Hacker News Reader

Building the same app for iOS and Android

coovtech.com

13 pointsjohns5 comments

The only way to edit layouts in Android is in xml. No pixel perfect single aspect ratio here. The visual layout tool is a joke and should only be used to quickly see what it might look like on a device of various resolutions. Emphasis on might.

The Android emulator is an embarassment though. Just horrible. The Android x86 project looks promising for a fast virtualized replacement.

Important to note is that the Author had taken classes in Java previously, but had no Objective-C experience (his primary language seems to be C#.) Spoiler: the iOS app took 2x as long to build.

If I were to guess [wrongly, it turns out], I'd say grokking Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now that it's in Xcode) might have been the issue.

IB seems to be a stumbling block, given how many Mac development newbies post to mailing lists asking how to avoid using it to build interfaces.

Maybe because it doesn't generate code? And sometimes people have difficulty working out how their code relates to the objects in IB, and how you connect the two, and how the objects in a nib communicate to objects in other nibs.

Hell, I've been using IB and Objective-C since 1992, and am still figuring out the new Xcode 4 IB.

Xcode 4 does a nice job of pointing out objects you may have forgotten to wire-up in IB. Prior to that, I struggled with IB. I realize now there is a cadence to it. Declare, synthesize, wire-up, implement delegate methods. Forget a step and your on StackOverflow face-palming.

I tried to get into iOS about 3.5 years ago. I failed miserably. IB was a big part of that...

Trying to get two objects to line-up horizontally with the designer in Eclipse... Well, it makes me want to punch something.

To be fair... The classes were a joke. We wrote the same mortgage payment calc in Java, VB, and SQL. In other words, college programming is a waste of time.

iOS taking twice as long had little to do with Objective-C, although I do find the language frustrating at times. But that's just like any other language I guess. If I had a dollar for every time I cursed at Javascript...

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