nah. actually 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF was going out of his way to prove the fact that "Apple is Ze L33t" or something, which is A) inaccurate, at least in this context, and B) pretty much completely off-topic. My answer was just a quick rebuttal of his assessment that if the original poster had used a Mac, he would have made less grammatical errors.
hmm... running Linux Mint here, and Firefox does automatic spell checking... actually pretty much everything does. Of course, I *DO* have English set as my default language, which might not be the case for everyone.
mod parent up. Same here ( 8.9'' AA1, 8GB SSD, running currently Linux Mint Gloria and tentatively the Awesome windows Manager) I can use it as an e-book reader (albeit a slightly heavy one), I can go online, I can code, do some 3D modeling with Blender, do some audio work with Audigy, use its webcam to take pictures or movies, retrieve photos from MMCs and so on, watch movies... and it 's so small and light that I just have it with me all the time. Apart from the battery-life which could be better, it's the best gadget I ever bought.
Depends on how you define "help documentation". Compare linux errors with windows'.
And seriously, the offline help in windows has never given me any useful info so far.. but maybe it's just me.
Other points (I'll paraphrase, as I obviously can't copy&paste):
"your customer doesn't need to relearn the things they want to do" : lie, unless the customer is already using Vista.
"Your customers know exactly what they are buying" dubious to say the least, unless someone explains to them exactly what the difference between each version of win7 is, and what the difference between XP, Vista and Win7 is. Let's be lenient, and just say they have their head up their arses
Camera, iPod, MP3 Compatibility? incredibly high for Linux at least for cameras and mp3.
Printers and Scanners compatibility? been a very long time since I found a printer or USB scanner not working out of the box in Linux (you know.. without first getting the drivers from the manufacturer's site) ->
Software Compatibility : you'll probably call it shady. I still can't run XScreensaver in windows (meaning : "Compatibility" is a complete useless term without context)
'Windows Live Essentials' interestingly it's "not supported" and not as I first read "unavailable". So, using Firefox in Windows to access Hotmail is probably not supported neither.
"The games your Customer Wants (e.g. WoW)" : really bad choice of game, cause for Wow it's an outright lie.
"Authorized Support", Cannonical, RedHat, Mint,... enough "Authorized Support" for many Linux distros. (so, yes, it's a lie)
"Video Chat on all major IM Networks", indeed. Skype runs perfectly, but I never could get a video chat running in MSN.
Ill pass the dubious use of "compatible" without context again, I'll just point out that at the price point of Photoshop for non-student, I'd rather say that its legal incarnation isn't THAT common.
"Windows work with more software and devices", probably, but not sure
"windows 7 still provide the same great experience they are familiar with"? ever seen someone used to XP fight with Vista? It's actually funny
The next one is really dependent on how you understand the sentence "Users can do what they want on their PC"... if they mean that the user has more freedom, then it's an outright lie (DRM anybody?)
"Linux requires a lot of time to maintain" -> lie. So much a lie actually, that I press people who call me more than three times because they have problems with their Windows installation to install Ubuntu or Mint (yes, I install it for them, of course) because it uses less of MY time as they call less often and there is practially no maintenance
"It can be unclear to user whether.. or are optional" -> lie. It's written in big fat bolded font to which category each update belongs (at least in Ubuntu and Mint.. but they attacked Ubuntu directly, so here it goes)
"there is no guarantee.. blablabla... users are on their own" -> lie ( proven by past experience.) Actually, a patch will probably be available faster than it would have been if the same security issue had been found.
"there is no ability to set parental protection" -> lie. MintNanny, for example (included in the mint distro on install)
"no step-by-step tutorials" they don't talk about whether they are on- or offline, so I still maintain it's a lie.
"because there are many versions of linux.. blalala" -> not an outright lie, but Oh! so close.
hmm... it implies that the people implementing the "irrelevent new features" can automagically do what Adobe is apparently not capable of. In other news, most common hardware is recognized out of the box in newer Linux distros, while a lot of plastic is wasted on dated drivers for windows which included in the packaging process.
OSX, obviously, doesn't even qualify, as it doesn't support anything apart from apple hardware (or equivalent)
I don't see what gives you that impression. The applications are not open source, and for the end user, the fact that Android itself is open source is pretty much irrelevant.
Well... I'm sure the people running Jamendo or Archive.org will be happy to know that commercially available music is Safe For Work, after all.. who would want legitimately free music?
It's very easy (and cheap) to start developing and publishing for Android. Personally (knowing that I wrote games, so not ~standard~ applications for Android), the OS itself is frustrating to write for, but that doesn lessen the first point.
The question was whether Android is developer-friendlier than the iPhone platform. Not whether the iPhone has been around for longer, or which platform has the most fart-o-rama applications. Therefore the battle-cry "Developing for iPhone means you have to shell out a lot more cash upfront and can't even be sure whether what you write will be published due to some arcane decision process behind Cupertino Castle's walls" is on point and relevant.
So, as you already owned a mac, were probably already familiar with objective-C, had an iPod touch, and had no problem shelling out $100 for the developer license, you don't see how those factors make it less friendly to developers? Welcome to the "a wee bit biased" club then.
As for the free IDE, awesome documentation and framework (don't get me wrong, the Android API in itself isn't bad at all.), the sample code and the additional toys, Android has them all. As someone else pointed out, you DO have access to the physical device with the release of the NDK. So on those points, I'd say both platforms are more or less equal (with, in my opinion, an advantage for the iPhone when it comes to native code, as the number of different platforms is lower)
True, if you don't use exclusively Java, you can get some decent performance. On the other hand, I still have an original Nokia nGage lying around, and although I never developed anything for it and so can't tell how developer friendly it was, it also had apparently more ~grunt~, considering it had a fully working C64 emulator along with full 3D games involving a lot more polys than doom... and that came out in 2003 (It also had some serious problems in other areas. I'm not disputing this fact)
One of the tools you get in the Sdk, called adb, can show you the Warning/Debug/Error log in realtime while you run your application. (adb logcat or adb lolcat in a terminal). Calls to the GC are shown too, along with the process ID and how long it took to run.
I wrote my first Android application on an Acer Aspire One (the 512MB/8GB SSD version) running Ubuntu Linux, and apart from the long starting time for Eclipse, it wasn't actually painful.
I would say that most persons have a computer with more grunt than that (it can even be a Mac btw.)
there is no review of your application and when you publish it, it's on the Android Market right away
Applications are written in Java, which means you can develop on any platform you like in a language that's not OSX specific
the SDK integrates nicely in Eclipse, which means you can have a ~nice~ (debatable I know) IDE for free
the documentation is (contrary to what other said) quite good and the #android-dev IRC channel on freenode provides great help
Sadly, Android suffers from
an incredibly bad Market, with one of the worst search engine ever written (a regular joke on #android is whether Google should ask Microsoft or Yahoo for a better search engine), and virtually no useful feedback mechanism for developers. This results in developers pushing fake updates just to make users aware that their applications exist, and comments like "sucks. crashes" littering the market (with no way to know which version actually crashed, nor to ask the user who posted the comment why/how/where the application crashed
24 hours refund even for 99c applications who have demo versions available and virtually no copyright protection. When you first get a ORDER/REFUND" cycle of less than 4mn on one of your applications, you get angry. The angriness just transforms into fatalistic depression after the tenth. Similarly, with games, when refunds is asked after 23 hours, you can't help but ask yourself what exactly, in terms of gameplay, users expected from a 99c game. (this is especially infuriating when the game has high replay value, but can be finished the first time around in a few hours)
Non-homogeneous hardware. You're supposed to write your applications so that they can run on vritually any display resolution, with or without trackball, hardware keyboard, and whatnot. Add to that the fact that the T-Mobile G1 is quite underpowered for graphically intensive applications and that that's probably what you're using to develop and the range of stuff you can do shrinks greatly.
Android applications are writen in Java, with the shortcomings this brings with it (anybody want to write a game and see how the GC kills the framerate by processing stuff that has nothing to do with your application? it's *really* fun)
So.. all in all, yes, it's far friendlier to developers, but it's also a highly frustrating platform to develop for.
Well... You're agreeing with the main article then? Nice movie, lots of weak point. Kind of decent in a way... sounds like Matrix (without the strong points) and pretty much everything Lucas ever did.
Good sci-fi movies of the last 5 years? I'll agree there are not many. There is Serenity(2005), but then, that only applies if you liked Firefly to start with. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (2005) movie was actually quite good, as long as you don't forget that Douglas Adams' re-tellings were always (with one exception) different from the original script... and Zoe Deschanel as Trillian was completely tasty. A Scanner Darkly was also quite nice (nothing like ripping a Philip K. Dick story if you want some paranoiac action). Personally I actually liked UltraViole (2006), mostly based on the fact that I tried to fill in the gaps that had been torn by the studio for release and then you have Wall-E (2008) which, although it also had its faults, was a "Good One".
Can't think of anything else that was good in the scifi genre in the last 5 years though.
I completely agree with those four points : Small independent games, modding communities, Emulations, Abandonware and better graphics/performance after a short while.
Wait... that's five points...
Incidentally I argued yesterday with him (D.Smart) on the board for one of his two new games, and I must say he really lives up to his reputation : he is quite in love with himself and unable to accept the least criticism and remarks about bugs in his games. ("Don't make a judgment about my game by trying out the demo" was worth a good laugh though)
From what I've read, Steenberg does seem to have more skills and less attitude
Maybe he is just in love with the look of the thing. I just watched the in-game video, and it's both weird looking and yet oddly attractive. A bit like playing in a Van Gogh.
The whole "build your own base/city" part sounded quite good to me too though
The best part of the video though is "oh! The sun is coming out! How nice";)
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nah. actually 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF was going out of his way to prove the fact that "Apple is Ze L33t" or something, which is A) inaccurate, at least in this context, and B) pretty much completely off-topic. My answer was just a quick rebuttal of his assessment that if the original poster had used a Mac, he would have made less grammatical errors.
yes... I assumed that much actually. I'm still wondering what GP was saying.
hmm ... running Linux Mint here, and Firefox does automatic spell checking ... actually pretty much everything does. Of course, I *DO* have English set as my default language, which might not be the case for everyone.
mod parent up. Same here ( 8.9'' AA1, 8GB SSD, running currently Linux Mint Gloria and tentatively the Awesome windows Manager) I can use it as an e-book reader (albeit a slightly heavy one), I can go online, I can code, do some 3D modeling with Blender, do some audio work with Audigy, use its webcam to take pictures or movies, retrieve photos from MMCs and so on, watch movies ... and it 's so small and light that I just have it with me all the time. Apart from the battery-life which could be better, it's the best gadget I ever bought.
Depends on how you define "help documentation". Compare linux errors with windows'. And seriously, the offline help in windows has never given me any useful info so far .. but maybe it's just me.
Other points (I'll paraphrase, as I obviously can't copy&paste):
Ill pass the dubious use of "compatible" without context again, I'll just point out that at the price point of Photoshop for non-student, I'd rather say that its legal incarnation isn't THAT common.
one out of many : "There are no self help tutorials provided and help documentation is limited". No ... they are NOT talking about windows.
hmm ... it implies that the people implementing the "irrelevent new features" can automagically do what Adobe is apparently not capable of. In other news, most common hardware is recognized out of the box in newer Linux distros, while a lot of plastic is wasted on dated drivers for windows which included in the packaging process.
OSX, obviously, doesn't even qualify, as it doesn't support anything apart from apple hardware (or equivalent)
yes. It's quite frozen right now! Definitely hot stuff.
I don't see what gives you that impression. The applications are not open source, and for the end user, the fact that Android itself is open source is pretty much irrelevant.
Well ... I'm sure the people running Jamendo or Archive.org will be happy to know that commercially available music is Safe For Work, after all .. who would want legitimately free music?
and OSX is free since ... ?
It's very easy (and cheap) to start developing and publishing for Android. Personally (knowing that I wrote games, so not ~standard~ applications for Android), the OS itself is frustrating to write for, but that doesn lessen the first point.
as far as I know, the Hero is slightly more powerful than the G1 though.
I guess I have karma to burn, so I'll feed you.
The question was whether Android is developer-friendlier than the iPhone platform. Not whether the iPhone has been around for longer, or which platform has the most fart-o-rama applications. Therefore the battle-cry "Developing for iPhone means you have to shell out a lot more cash upfront and can't even be sure whether what you write will be published due to some arcane decision process behind Cupertino Castle's walls" is on point and relevant.
So, as you already owned a mac, were probably already familiar with objective-C, had an iPod touch, and had no problem shelling out $100 for the developer license, you don't see how those factors make it less friendly to developers? Welcome to the "a wee bit biased" club then.
As for the free IDE, awesome documentation and framework (don't get me wrong, the Android API in itself isn't bad at all.), the sample code and the additional toys, Android has them all. As someone else pointed out, you DO have access to the physical device with the release of the NDK. So on those points, I'd say both platforms are more or less equal (with, in my opinion, an advantage for the iPhone when it comes to native code, as the number of different platforms is lower)
True, if you don't use exclusively Java, you can get some decent performance. On the other hand, I still have an original Nokia nGage lying around, and although I never developed anything for it and so can't tell how developer friendly it was, it also had apparently more ~grunt~, considering it had a fully working C64 emulator along with full 3D games involving a lot more polys than doom ... and that came out in 2003 (It also had some serious problems in other areas. I'm not disputing this fact)
One of the tools you get in the Sdk, called adb, can show you the Warning/Debug/Error log in realtime while you run your application. (adb logcat or adb lolcat in a terminal).
Calls to the GC are shown too, along with the process ID and how long it took to run.
I wrote my first Android application on an Acer Aspire One (the 512MB/8GB SSD version) running Ubuntu Linux, and apart from the long starting time for Eclipse, it wasn't actually painful.
I would say that most persons have a computer with more grunt than that (it can even be a Mac btw.)
... provided of course you own a mac (just to make that clear)
Sadly, Android suffers from
So .. all in all, yes, it's far friendlier to developers, but it's also a highly frustrating platform to develop for.
Well ... You're agreeing with the main article then? Nice movie, lots of weak point. Kind of decent in a way ... sounds like Matrix (without the strong points) and pretty much everything Lucas ever did.
Good sci-fi movies of the last 5 years? I'll agree there are not many. There is Serenity(2005), but then, that only applies if you liked Firefly to start with. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (2005) movie was actually quite good, as long as you don't forget that Douglas Adams' re-tellings were always (with one exception) different from the original script ... and Zoe Deschanel as Trillian was completely tasty. A Scanner Darkly was also quite nice (nothing like ripping a Philip K. Dick story if you want some paranoiac action).
Personally I actually liked UltraViole (2006), mostly based on the fact that I tried to fill in the gaps that had been torn by the studio for release and then you have Wall-E (2008) which, although it also had its faults, was a "Good One".
Can't think of anything else that was good in the scifi genre in the last 5 years though.
I seriously have to ask : what does a 1-Dimensional wave look like????
I completely agree with those four points : Small independent games, modding communities, Emulations, Abandonware and better graphics/performance after a short while. Wait... that's five points ...
Incidentally I argued yesterday with him (D.Smart) on the board for one of his two new games, and I must say he really lives up to his reputation : he is quite in love with himself and unable to accept the least criticism and remarks about bugs in his games. ("Don't make a judgment about my game by trying out the demo" was worth a good laugh though)
From what I've read, Steenberg does seem to have more skills and less attitude
Maybe he is just in love with the look of the thing. I just watched the in-game video, and it's both weird looking and yet oddly attractive. A bit like playing in a Van Gogh.
The whole "build your own base/city" part sounded quite good to me too though
The best part of the video though is "oh! The sun is coming out! How nice" ;)