Day: February 10, 2009

Android versus iPhone

I’m currently sitting in a RJUG presentation about programming for the Android (Google) phone. As part of the talk, the presenter passed around his “Development” phone, which is basically a G1 without the service contract. There is a lot to like about Android, but in many ways it seems like it’s not really polished.

For instance, holding the “Development” phone and my iPod Touch shows that animation (including scrolling lists) seems jerky on Android compared to Apple. The Android version of the bubble level app just jumps to the final position, rather than sliding there.

Android’s run time environment seems very powerful and it can do a lot of things that you can’t do on the iPhone. Like background processes and interprocess communications. But the things it can do that iPhone can do, it looks like it would be harder on the Android.

I’d much rather do Java on Eclipse than Objective-C (a seriously weird language) on Xcode (an IDE that I still don’t like). On the other hand, I don’t think I want to manually create user interfaces in XML rather than using InterfaceBuilder. (On the gripping hand, maybe somebody will write a decent interface builder for Android, fix the stuttery scrolling and make non-ugly widget set.)

Sigh. Why isn’t there one perfect SmartPhone instead of a couple that are half-way there?

Scared to death

Update: Turns out I wasn’t in much danger. According to this link, it goes away in a minute or two. Thanks to Lara for the information.

Thirty minutes or so ago, I thought I was going to die. I was drifting off to sleep, when suddenly I couldn’t breathe. It felt like mucus had completely plugged my airway, just as I’d fully exhaled. Because my lungs were almost empty, I didn’t have enough breath in me to cough it out. In retrospect, a full-on rib-breaking Heimlich might have dislodged it, but I wouldn’t have been able to make Vicki understand what I wanted even if I’d thought of it. Instead, I was sort of vaguely gesticulating and she was asking if I needed an ambulance, but I couldn’t answer. I guess we were both a little panicy at that point.

After what seemed like minutes but was probably only a few seconds, I was able to start wheezing in small breaths, but nowhere near a lung full. I felt like I was rapidly falling into oxygen debt as the massive effort it took to get in a small breath of air seemed to take more oxygen than I was taking in. But each breath was opening up the airway a tiny bit more than the last, and after a few I had enough in my lungs to cough, and that really opened the airway to where I wasn’t worried about passing out.

Like I said, it’s about half an hour later, and I’m still clearing my throat almost constantly, and I’m scared to lie down. If you don’t hear from me again, the root passwords and life insurance policy numbers are in a file called “AdministrationStuff” on my home directory on the Linux box.