Having created an Android version of my iPhone app Grocery Cook I thought I would share some thoughts on the differences between the two platforms. To boil it down, Android’s language of choice, Java is better than iOS’s Objective-C, but iOS has a more comprehensive API. Having full desktop Java on a mobile device is quite nice but you tend to have to create more code to make up for the holes in the API.
Read more
I was over in Ireland for Christmas and I needed to do some work on an iPhone app but I don’t have a Mac laptop. I couldn’t get a hackintosh working on my Windows laptop that would run XCode 4. Initially I tried remotely accessing my Mac Mini with a program called iRAPP. It works like Windows Terminal Services so it’s a bit better than the built-in screen sharing (VNC). My broadband connection in Ireland wasn’t brilliant so there was quite a bit of latency but SSH worked fine so I decided to create an Ant script that would upload my source files to the Mac Mini and compile and deploy it to a server so I could install the app on my iPhone using ad-hoc over-the-air distribution.
Read more
As a web developer I’m used to getting stuff to work on a number of different browsers. With the web and mobile phones, software has become available to a far wider audience so I think one should take advantage of that strength. With both the iPhone and Android version of my mobile app I targeted the current OS version but implemented it so it would degrade gracefully for previous versions of the OS. In the Android version I set the minimum Android version to 1.6 because that is the minimum requirement for in-app purchases.
Read more
Sometimes it would be nice to click on an Android class and be able to see the source in Eclipse. You could download the source using Git but you then have to rearrange the Java files. The following is the most straight forward way I have found.
Read more
