Android Apprenticeship | Hacker News Reader

Android Apprenticeship

blog.bloc.io

13 pointsendlessvoid9417 comments

Seriously, creating an "Instragram" or a "Twitter" following this tutorial http://developer.android.com/training/basics/firstapp/index.... is very easy if you know how to code, I wouldn't spend $5,000 on that, but if you don't know how to code the I would spend those $5k in learning how to code in a different platform since beginning with mobile apps it's no easy stuff.

I don't know if it's fair to call a paid education an "apprenticeship."

It looks to me like you only get 3 hours of (admittedly 1-on-1) instruction per week for 12 weeks. That doesn't seem like much for $3500/$5000.

Compare that to Make Games With Us [0], which teaches you how to make iOS games in Objective-C and Cocos2D, gives classes 9-5 x 5 days a week for 8 weeks, for $5000.

[0] https://www.makegameswith.us/summer-academy/

that's actually just the minimum amount of time you're REQUIRED to spend :-)

Most students do more.

Ok, thanks for clarifying that.

FYI, Coursera is offering a free alternative. No one-on-one, but an active student community on the course. https://class.coursera.org/android-001

The biggest hurdle in learning Android programming isn't the platform or the Java language, is that stupid, stupid Eclipse.

have you tried Android Studio?

Bloc's apprenticeship teaches Android Studio :)

I'm using neither Eclipse, nor Studio for Android programming, but Emacs, believe it or not.

With Java Development Environment for Emacs, I even have that Eclipse-like (semi-)automatic import of Android packages, like TextView.

I wish I had the time to improve things like JDE's auto-import even more, but I've been too busy. Various people have blogged about their experiences developing Android in Emacs, they have some useful hints. I like it better than Studio and Eclipse myself, but people have different tastes.

Are there any IDEs out there that aren't hated? I find Eclipse to be fine but I've been using it for years now (since it's early days). On the other hand, I've been using VS for a couple of years and think it stinks.

I feel the same way, but today after playing a bit with Android Studio, I ended up back on Eclipse.

Somehow the fonts don't look right on Windows, even after some customization and I was getting some eye strain, just after a while of playing with it.

This isn't Swing vs SWT, because I also have Netbeans and it renders quite well.

Eclipse should no longer be a valid complaint.

I started Android dev using with Eclipse. Moving to Android Studio made everything much, much smoother (except for builds, which take slightly longer now).

Android Studio is much better for showing views in multiple form factors.

Another important step, using an Atom Based image + Intel Hardware Acceleration Module (http://software.intel.com/en-us/android/articles/installatio...).

This reduces load time from about 2+ minutes to 15 seconds and similarly makes debugging apps much, much smoother.

Things that still bother me (as a converted iOS developer):

  * Java's lack of anonymous functions (blocks in iOS)
  * having to design for many more form factors
  * no standard core data function
  * not being able to ignore Android 2.* market share (seriously, this lacks even a simple Action Bar)
  * managing 4+ pixel densities for assets

Haven't tried it myself yet but the latest Support Library includes a supposedly full-featured ActionBar. That would make it suck much less. Just in time for 2.x to start fading away.

It all depends on the type of Android programming. If you're making games with a library like libGDX, Eclipse is great. AFAICT, the problem is when you need to create a classic application with widgets and UI layouts.

One of my co-authors likes IDEA. After trying Android Studio, I have have to say... I'm not bowled over.

I could write a book full of Eclipse annoyances. I could build up a real hot hatred over it being a fraud of a GUI. The architecture is ridiculous and is the root cause of much of the UI suckage. But a lot of the sharp edges have been knocked off and the Android refactorings have become very impressive. I'll never love it. But I can use it.

NetBeans, IDEA, and VS used to all be markedly better. Now they are just maybe somewhat better. Yes it's a shame Google can't use NetBeans. But. Meh.

Back in the day, I even got a contract for writing a book on Visual J++ before Sun sued it out of existence in part because. at the time (what was it? 15 years ago?) I was pissed at how awful Sun's toolchain was and I thought they deserved to lose control of Java to Microsoft.

Now, I can't get too excited as long as code completion, debugging, and refactoring work smoothly.

Android before iOS...interesting.

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