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iPhone vs gPhone, as a Developer
Dec. 30th, 2008 12:37 amI had some quiet time over the Christmas weekend to do some personal hacking. I thought of a little app I could write for my iPhone that I think would be relatively original and useful and maybe I could sell it for a few bucks. (I'll tell you what it is someday later when it's done and ready, maybe next week.) I dove into iPhone app hacking using the familiar XCode Apple development tools I use to do other hacking on my Macs. Things went pretty quickly laying out GUI elements and getting some basic connecting code written. At some point I got to the point of actually writing some crucial function of my app and after an hour of digging through iPhone developer documentation I decided that the feature I want just isn't there. The iPhone cannot do what I want it to do! I've heard rumors that Apple is going to move to fix the sorts of things I want in the future, but right now it fails.
So, having recently been given a gPhone I downloaded the android sdk and got to work with that. I started by looking for the feature I needed that the iPhone lacked and quickly found three different ways of achieving what I want. This time, it will work. So, I start over in a new development environment, eclipse, which I had only used a couple times before. On the plus side, I generally like Java (which android uses) better than Objective C (which Apple got infected with when it acquired NeXT and made the NextStep system the core of MacOS X and the iPhone). It turns out that the Android SDK integrates impressively well with eclipse, and eclipse really shines at making a big strange new library accessible, autocompleting functions I barely guessed existed.
So, after sinking a few hours into developing for each platform, right now I'm much happier with Android. If it were up to developers like me, that kind of phone should be the eventual market winner. On the other hand as a user, iPhone is still slick and well done and will remain my primary phone. The plucky little Linux phone with the nice-to-develop-for Java environment has a long way to go to beat iPhone's user experience and market penetration. Hmpf.
So, having recently been given a gPhone I downloaded the android sdk and got to work with that. I started by looking for the feature I needed that the iPhone lacked and quickly found three different ways of achieving what I want. This time, it will work. So, I start over in a new development environment, eclipse, which I had only used a couple times before. On the plus side, I generally like Java (which android uses) better than Objective C (which Apple got infected with when it acquired NeXT and made the NextStep system the core of MacOS X and the iPhone). It turns out that the Android SDK integrates impressively well with eclipse, and eclipse really shines at making a big strange new library accessible, autocompleting functions I barely guessed existed.
So, after sinking a few hours into developing for each platform, right now I'm much happier with Android. If it were up to developers like me, that kind of phone should be the eventual market winner. On the other hand as a user, iPhone is still slick and well done and will remain my primary phone. The plucky little Linux phone with the nice-to-develop-for Java environment has a long way to go to beat iPhone's user experience and market penetration. Hmpf.
