My first Android coding experience
(and why it is so much better then iPhone development)
Last week I downloaded the Android 1.1 Development tools and installed them into a fresh Eclipse 3.4 installation. When I started coding, I recognized the first good thing: Documentation. There is ton’s of it – and not only from Google, but also in blogs and forums. This is something I miss for the iPhone development. When I had a problem with my Android code, I just googled for a solution and always found one! This is not the case with the iPhone.
Another big thing for me is the Eclipse integration – I love Eclipse, I think I could not life without it anymore. So for me it is great to do the Android development with a tool I know and which I love. With the iPhone development however, I have to use XCode, which in my opinion is horrible. The code completion is bad and then I have hundreds of windows, so it is easy to lose the overview.
The way UIs are build for the iPhone is not the way I like to work. For me it seems so strange to drag and drop lines between independent windows. Speaking of UI development – first I found the XML based UIs for Android not very good either. But now, after I familiarized myself with it, I think it is a very good way to enforce the MVC paradigm – no more coding in the UI layer.
So with the Android IDE I was able to build a simple list and detail view application including local data storage within hours.
But I should be fair – I wrote my first Java application 12 years ago – my first Objective C experience is just two months old – maybe this is the reason why I prefer the Android development.
I own an iPhone and I love the device – however the coding for it does not excite me. For the Android platform it is the opposite – I’m not very hot for getting an Android based SmartPhone, but I love the development. I’m looking forward to write more advanced applications with the Android SDK in the future.