ActionScript & Android

Recently I’ve been tasked to learn Android whilst at Great Fridays, I’ve been keeping a close eye on Android for sometime and jumped ship from iPhone to Android device about 2 months ago. Let me say there are some very rough edges to the operating system, which need to be addressed or users will simply pick up the next latest thing.

So what is it like developing Android? To be honest, I’m finding it quite slow going, there is a lot of documentation for the platform, which is great. What isn’t great is the lack of sandboxed examples, the API demos don’t count as this is a mess beyond believe! These should be split up in to micro applications that just show one thing and not everything. I’m from a AS3 background, where if something isn’t working I know where to extend and implement and how to implement. This has taken years of experience, knowing where to mount my overriding behaviour. The problem this is a different language, a different code framework, so being able to customise layouts and components is rather tiresome and difficult. I’m learning from scratch, I’m a small fish and a very big ocean!

At first I thought the xml setup of views and the like would be amazing, but I’m going off it already. I’m still going to keep cracking at it, as I’m sure it’s the best way, but I feel I can knock something out which is more flexible in code, that might just be me? – I also feel the same way about mxml! I even understand why you should do this, I’ve even created a layout manager in xml for my own projects and I’ve made a XUL parser years ago for a university project. The problem is I think the layout management in Android is wrong, it’s not flexible enough, it’s too restrictive. I would have preferred making it more like a fluid layout system and just attaching objects to rows, columns. I’ve been told about layout_weight recently, which is something I’ve completely overlooked and that give me the satisfaction I’ve been looking for, it’s something to look at though.

One thing I do like though is the component set (minus the layout views), they seem powerful and thought through, something to definitely build off. Just a pity they’re not supported by good feature set around them.