Android question

[Carlo Lopez]

Hey guys!

thank you for taking the time to answer us, the humans.

I'd like to know what you think are the aspects that Android has to enhance?? (from the user's and the developer's point of view)

thanks in advance!!

[Lucas Jordan]

Android is a surprising complete technology, but of course everything can be improved. If I could make anything better it would be to improve how layout and animations work together. For those who have worked with Swing, Android will not feel all that different, except when you want to animate something. For example, there is a bug (I call it a bug anyway) where an Animation will change where a component (or Drawable) is drawn, but does not change where the component receives events. For example, say you have a button on the left side of the screen and you want to animate it to the right. If you use the Animation class (and why wouldn't you, its called Animation after all?) to move the button to the right, it will not respond to touch events at the right side of the screen, only where the button visually used to be, on the left. To make it work right, you have to request that button be laid out again at the end of the animation, specifying its final coordinates. This is extra, error prone, code.

Speaking of Animations, maybe I was just spoiled by the way JavaFX's Timeline class worked, but I find the way Animation works a little tricky when you want to chain Animations together. With Timeline you can just say, "Never mind where you start, just end here", With Animations, you have to know something about the location and scale of a View in order create the desired result. This is due to the fact that AnimationSet applies all sub animations, even those that have elapsed.


My 2 cents anyway
-Lucas Jordan

Carlo Lopez wrote:Hey guys!

thank you for taking the time to answer us, the humans.

I'd like to know what you think are the aspects that Android has to enhance?? (from the user's and the developer's point of view)

thanks in advance!!

I WANNA WIN YOUR BOOK!!!

[Nidhi Sar]

How about a decent tool for designing screens?

Trying to design even reasonably good looking screen is such a pain using the 'Graphical Layout' tab of the screens (I use Eclipse). Why can't it be simpler? I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft, but designing Visual Basic screens using Visual Studio is *SO* much simpler. Just drag & drop widgets - radio buttons, text boxes & so on - where-ever you want.

For Android screens you have to mess around with Linear Layouts & Relative Layouts & "this view is to the left of that" & "padding above" & embedding one layout within another & so on. I think the productivity of developers on Android would go astronomically higher if there were a better design tool.

[Lucas Jordan]

I agree completely that it should be simpler. I guess the issue is that Android really does not want you using absolute positioning (they even deprecated the class). I have not seen a graphical tool that is easy to use AND does screen resizing well... well the tool in Netbeans is pretty good, but not awesome. I have not worked with Visual Basic in a long time. Nidhi Sar, would you recommend looking at the Visual Basic tools for inspiration for developing a better tool?

-Lucas

Nidhi Sar wrote:How about a decent tool for designing screens?

Trying to design even reasonably good looking screen is such a pain using the 'Graphical Layout' tab of the screens (I use Eclipse). Why can't it be simpler? I can't believe I'm praising Microsoft, but designing Visual Basic screens using Visual Studio is *SO* much simpler. Just drag & drop widgets - radio buttons, text boxes & so on - where-ever you want.

For Android screens you have to mess around with Linear Layouts & Relative Layouts & "this view is to the left of that" & "padding above" & embedding one layout within another & so on. I think the productivity of developers on Android would go astronomically higher if there were a better design tool.