Android programming
Frankly I'm not that fond of the Android platform, but recently we programmed an app for Intel, and in helping the developer implement the functionality I was struck with a couple of similarities in between it and iOS.
Of course memory management was important, freeing allocations, not freeing used variables, but I was surprised how little difference the Android's garbage collection made in this. It felt like the limit on application memory was tighter on Android, and clearing out references and initiating garbage collection was necessary. With Automatic Reference Counting in XCode 4, iOS memory management is much easier and better performing than on Android
Also when the developer ran into issues with putting up a waiting indicator, my experience with the main thread updating the UI, and how to get an activity indicator up, launch a thread to do a task, and have it callback to the main thread to clear the indicator was exactly how it worked on Android as well.
Of course memory management was important, freeing allocations, not freeing used variables, but I was surprised how little difference the Android's garbage collection made in this. It felt like the limit on application memory was tighter on Android, and clearing out references and initiating garbage collection was necessary. With Automatic Reference Counting in XCode 4, iOS memory management is much easier and better performing than on Android
Also when the developer ran into issues with putting up a waiting indicator, my experience with the main thread updating the UI, and how to get an activity indicator up, launch a thread to do a task, and have it callback to the main thread to clear the indicator was exactly how it worked on Android as well.
Labels: android, arc, garbage collection, memory, threads
posted by Jiro Feingold at
7:32 PM
1 Comments:
The Android SDK is terrible. I highly recommend libgdx.
http://code.google.com/p/libgdx/
It's very fast, using nice C++ libraries (almost identical to Processing). You write everything in Java so can even test locally without the emulator or a device. In general, getting into the NDK and only using what you need from the Android SDK to launch your Java app is the best way to approach development on this platform, IMO.
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