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.

iPhone progress

Things aren’t going as fast as I’d like. I finished the Apple “The Objective-C Programming Language 2.0” and “iPhone Application Programming Guide” documents. I’m about half way through Phone Human Interface Guidelines” (which I read at lunch) and also “Beginning iPhone Development”, which I read at home because I need to work through the examples.

I have a mental picture of what screens I need and what controls they’ll have on them, so I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just go into Interface Builder and build the screens. That might at least give me something to show off.

Is it just me, or is Objective-C a weird language? I find it annoying that I have to declare a variable and then give the exact same declaration in the @property statement, for instance.

So cold

It’s freezing here at work. I’m not sure if it’s everywhere or just at my desk – there is a bit of a cold breeze here. My feet have been freezing since I got here and my fingers are clumsy. I actually warmed up a bit when I went to Wegmans for lunch. People are looking at me funny because I’m wearing a toque, but at least my fingers are working again. Still no joy with my feet though. I wonder what they’d think if I put on my moon boots?

More requirements

Some more utterly blue-sky long term goals for the app. Some of them depend entirely on what the phone can do, and I don’t know if it can or not yet.

  • Attach a photo from the library as an icon for the aircraft. Maybe for locations as well, and/or a link to the Maps application. Link people (other crew and passengers) to Contact app, so you can display a picture, and even look up a phone number to call them to go flying!
  • Import from google docs – or a server to do it if the phone can’t. Or maybe direct import from a SQLite database through iTunes? Don’t know – just need a way to get hundreds of records from a previous log book like AvLogBook.
  • Carry forward totals from previous log books.
  • Checkpoint and export – everything before a certain date is exported and deleted, and running totals (ie carry forward) updated.