Android Critique

I like to think that I can evaluate and judge a product based on its merits, but there are some companies that elicit emotional responses from me. Apple is one. Contrary to common emotional responses, I get repulsed by Apple products, just because it is Apple. I used to be neutral with them... I liked the iPod, but was never very interested in anything else they did. With their handling of the iPhone (and the App Store specifically), I have come to mistrust them, and now I will actively avoid their products when possible.

Google also brings up emotional feelings for me, but quite the opposite. I have a soft spot for Google for a few reasons. They are strong supporters of open source, both by providing a lot of open source projects (Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, some neat Java libraries... to name a few), but also by providing infrastructure (google code). Most of their products are free, which is hard to dislike. Not only are they free, they tend to be pretty good. I have never had problems with their search. GMail has always been so simple and easy to use that I would never think of switching (especially after seeing people struggle with Yahoo Mail, which seems so cluttered and complicated by contrast). Android blew me away as my first smart phone (with the G1).

With the emotional responses, it's a bit hard to judge whether I like a product from its merits, or it is just my fanboyism that is blinding me to the issues. I want to take a moment to critique Android in this light. I still love the platform, but it would be foolish to claim there are no issues. I honestly believe that overall it is a step up from the iPhone, but I have never had extended time with the iPhone to really have an honestly unbiased opinion there.

First, the good things. Given the right hardware, it can be a snappy OS. The G1 can be sluggish, but my new Droid has proven a significant speed boost. Widgets represent a huge advantage over the bland icon-only iPhone interface. I like having the calendar straight there on my desktop, no touching to see what I have coming up. The ability for an application to always display pertinent information is pretty cool.

Multithreading and background processes can be a pain to implement, but it is a neat feature that Android has over the iPhone. I can have applications actively retrieving useful information, or interacting with each other, or switch between processes while long running tasks are executing. It makes my phone experience much more in line with my desktop computer experience.

The updates are constantly making the Android experience better. Before I switched to the Droid, I had navigation on my G1, something that was nowhere in sight when I first got it. Widgets didn't really exist, and I can now do things such as search with voice commands. The Market (equivalent to the Apple App Store) has slowly evolved with the platform. It only supported free apps initially, but now has both paid and free. Screenshots were added recently, along with the ability to view the top free and paid apps separately. I expect the Market experience only to improve with time.

Now to move on to some bad things. I really like the Droid hardware, but one thing I miss from the G1 are a dedicated number row on the physical keyboard. It is really annoying to have to press alt to type a number. I also miss a dedicated call/answer and hangup button. Those 2 missing features of the hardware are offset by the much better screen and the increased processing and storage power. However, I really miss them.

As for Android itself, the biggest issue is probably caused by the choice of Java as the development language. Applications tend to pause every now and then, including the standard apps like the browser. It could be too many background processes running, but it is very reminiscent of garbage collection pauses which are common in Java. I hope this will be improved with ever better hardware along with improvements in the Dalvik VM that Android uses.

My G1 didn't seem to lock up that often, but my Droid has already locked up a few times, and experienced other glitches that you might not be used to happening in a phone. The oddest recently happened where I could hear just fine during a call, but only when the speaker was on. Switch to non-speaker mode and I couldn't hear a word. Rebooting the phone fixed it. I expect software to fail like this now and then, but it is not good to have my phone crash when I could be receiving an important call, or otherwise experience weird glitches while speaking with someone. I expect updates to resolve these kinds of issues, but it is unfortunate to see any of such catastrophic failures. Probably the worst failure I have had was on my G1, when I had lost reception for about a day without realizing it. The phone just stopped receiving phone calls until I rebooted.

There are a lot of features that are very useful, but very hard to discover. For example, long press on the home button will bring up a dialog that will let you run recent applications. This is extremely useful when switching between a couple applications. Similarly, I only recently learned how to cut and paste with keyboard shortcuts instead of clunky menu controls. I had to find those by looking online. Perhaps it isn't fair to blame the platform for hard to discover features, but it might be nice if the platform gave easy to use, short tutorials the first time you do certain key tasks.

The Market still needs a lot of work. What is the one thing Google should get right in its mobile platform? Search! Searching in the Market doesn't work very well. I have run keywords looking for specific applications, only to get back no results, even though the keywords should have worked. For example, "snogg" will not find the "DoggCatcher" application, even though the developers are "SnoggDoggler." There are also very minimal ways to find applications. You can search, you can browse various categories, and you can look at the top paid, top free, or "just in" of a particular category. Unfortunately "top" has no clear meaning. Under the top free list of all games, PapiJump is below WordSearch Unlimited Free. Except, WordSearch has less downloads (50k - 250k vs. PapiJump's over 250k), and a lower rating (4 stars vs. 4.5 stars). It would be nice to sort the lists in various ways, such as by overall vote score, number of downloads, whatever the current "top" algorithm is, alphabetically, etc.

Overall I am very happy with the platform, but some of the issues I have run into are probably non-starters for some people. It has clearly gotten better since I first started with my G1, so I have no doubts that the platform will only improve with time, and eventually beat out Apple as the #1 smart phone.

Dev Days: Mobile

Let's revisit Dev Days San Francisco. Last time, I talked about the Microsoft talk, and how I was able to incorporate auto sanitization into Rails. This time, I would like to discuss the three mobile talks that were presented. Just for full disclosure, I am a big fan of Android, so you will likely see that bias come through. I know I felt the bias while taking in the three talks.

iPhone

First up was Rory Blythe talking about iPhone development. Of the three presenters, he was the most at ease speaking in front of a crowd. I'm sure Rory is a nice guy, but he had a swagger that... felt very Apple-esque. He was the hipster Apple guy smugly looking at us and telling us why we should cow down to the almighty Steve Jobs, and why we should be happy to do so. He made the audience laugh the most, most often with flaws in the iPhone development platform that we all know is an issue. Cheekily telling us three or four times that you cannot develop for the iPhone on anything but an Apple machine sure doesn't sit well with an Ubuntu fan like me. I don't think he was trying to sell the platform, though, just give us a taste for what it was like.

Most of the talk was him walking through the steps to develop a simple application in Xcode. It was very visual. Click here and drag over there to hook up a click handler of some kind. Drag this widgit in line with these others. Ultimately, we got to peek at some actual Objective C. If you weren't at Dev Days and you have never seen Objective C, be thankful you didn't have to, because it ain't pretty. He joked about how many places you have to adjust the code just to set up a simple property. As a Rails web developer, it made me want to claw my eyes out. I would never want to develop in such a redundant, cumbersome language.

There was good news, though. He introduced us to MonoTouch, a development environment for producing iPhone applications written in C# with the .NET platform. I'll take Ruby any day, but between the choices of C# and Objective C, it is a no brainer (C# of course... from someone who generally despises Microsoft technology). Too bad I can't use Ruby to develop an iPhone app on an Ubuntu machine. I might consider iPhone development then, though not seriously. If you wonder what is wrong with me... well, I choose an open platform, because I feel in the long run it will win out to a closed platform. I am convinced all the bad press towards the App Store approval process fiasco, and Apple's draconian attitude towards the 3rd party development community will ultimately be the iPhone's undoing.

Maemo/QT

The next mobile talk came from Daniel Rocha of Nokia. He talked about Qt, specifically in the context of Maemo. He was very dry. Dryer than a desert when compared to Rory. Some people just aren't built for speaking... I'm sure I would freeze up and be just as bad, but thankfully I don't seek such torture for myself.

It was a running theme to do some actual development on stage to demo the platform for the audience. The core message of his talk was "Look! Cross platform! Same code for all the major platforms, including mobile!" Alright, C++ cross platform I guess is kinda cool, except it's not that impressive in today's context. Java has been highly cross platform from the beginning, and all the primary scripting languages are quite cross platform as well.

The most impressive aspect of his cross platform demo is that the UI is among this cross-platformness, which I suppose is the whole point. However, he admitted about still needing macros to segregate the platforms now and then. And I really don't believe that a mobile UI should be the same as a desktop UI. With the state of mobile devices, I think it's wiser to develop a UI with a small screen (and touch screen capabilities) in mind. Negative points also for running Linux in a VM inside Windows instead of the other way around.

The Qt IDE he was showing off was also quite unimpressive. It looked like Visual Studio circa 2000. The UI designer looked exactly like an old Visual Studio UI designer, with that grid of dots and all. I got the feeling that anyone used to a good IDE like Eclipse would feel shackled in this thing. Anyone used to an awesome editor like Emacs will... well, an Emacs user would never stoop to a lesser editor of any kind.

The funny thing about this talk is that it was followed by an Android presenter who pointed out how most major manufacturers, except Nokia, were coming out with devices with Android. All I can say is, Nokia is dropping the ball if they stick with this platform over hopping on Android. I saw no compelling reason to develop for Qt/Maemo.

Android

James Yum finished the Mobile hat trick with an Android talk. I wanted to be blown away by this talk, but unfortunately Rory was the only awesome speaker of the three. To be fair, James was up front that he was asked to do this talk last minute, replacing the original Google speaker, who probably would have crushed it.

He started off by showing the "Droid Does" Verizon commercial, which was an awesome commercial (despite not actually showing the device, and despite coming from a company I'm not a fan of). He then read some of the YouTube comments for the commercial, to humorous effect. I really hope T-Mobile comes out with a phone this compelling. According to James and the commercial, it has an 800x480 screen with a physical keyboard and a powerful chipset.

Great start, lousy finish. He followed this up with an uninspiring demo of how to deal with threads in Android, with the specific goal of making a snappier UI. He went from a simplistic but completely incorrect way to do threading to an object oriented way using the Android API. It made developing with Java look almost as bad as Objective C. I'm not exactly a fan of Java (though I work in it almost every day), but it really isn't this bad to work with Java, and specifically Android. I think he would have better shown off the platform by taking a real (though small) application idea, and implementing it on stage. This is what Rory did, and it had a much greater effect than slogging through the most complicated aspect of modern programming you could possibly think of.

Overall, James was far too green for the speech. He was (understandably) clearly nervous, and he was unable to answer most of the questions at the end of his talk. I was silently rooting for him, hoping he could show all the would-be iPhone developers what they are missing, but I was disappointed. Maybe Google will learn from this and keep a good speaker on hand as a backup, should the primary speaker have to drop out last minute.

A Nerd's Proposal

I got out of the car, and then helped her out. I was a bit nervous as we walked towards the restaurant, arm in arm. She reached her arm around me, edging her hand close to my inner left breast pocket. Uh oh! I stiffened my arm and blocked a potential revelation on her part. Safe for now (so I thought, anyway).

We walked into the restaurant and took a booth. It was New Year's Day, and not really that full. I had wanted a more significant location, but my first choice place was closed that day... drat! After some idle chat and ordering our meal, I figured it was now or never... or at least now or some other day. I wanted to do it now, so I took out my phone.

"I found this really cool Will and Grace app!" Her Christmas present was the Will and Grace box set. She was a big fan, so I figured a Will and Grace app would be interesting to her.

"Check it out, it's pretty cool. Click through that splash screen." I reached down into my inner coat pocket and grabbed the box. I opened it and waited.

She clicked through, selected a season and episode. She hit the item to play the episode, and after a brief pause, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" from the Jersey Boys musical started playing. That's our special song, so I figured it was a good pick. I pulled up the box and held it out as she looked at a graphic with a couple hearts with the words "Will you marry me?"

Each moment that passed after that was stretched out like an eternity. She finally looked up and simply said "yes." That's it! I'm now engaged. She's the most wonderful woman in the world, and now I get to share my life with her.

Now that you know how it went down, let me tell you what went wrong. I settled on the day a few weeks before, while I was at my parent's house for Christmas vacation. I realized my Android phone would be the perfect way for me to pop the question... I could write a customized little app just for her! Google images proved useful for the "Will you marry me" graphic. It was a snap to rip our song from my CD musical recording. The hardest part was gathering all the content for all the Will and Grace episodes. Episode names was all I needed, but I had to take them from IMDB and convert them into Java strings. It was time consuming, but once all the content was set up, the Java app itself was a snap.

I guess that was what went well. The blunders came closer to the day. First came when I was asking her for dinner on the first. "Let's have dinner New Year's Day to ring in the new year!" Whoops. Very bad choice of words, especially since we picked the ring together... she knew it was coming, just not when. Why the hell did I say THAT??? She was of course suspicious, but I assured her it was just for dinner... I totally hadn't meant to give her a hint so early, but what's done is done.

We decided on the perfect place for dinner. Our 6 month anniversary had been at a nice fondu place. Perfect! I called them up, hoping to make a reservation, but alas! They are closed on the first! I expressed my disappointment to her... perhaps too emphatically. We agreed on another place. Not ideal, but I was determined to do this on the first.

New Year's Eve was at her parent's place. It was a lot of fun, and we were all packed to head over to Sacramento, which was our destination. I spilled some drink or something on my pants and all I had to spare was my nice clothes prepared for dinner. She suggested I change, and when she saw I only had nice clothes, she looked at me odd "we are dressing up for dinner?" I gave an excuse that it was New Year's... while wishing I had planned this a little better. All my effort went into the program to propose, why hadn't I worked out these details a little better? I'm not exactly good at thinking ahead and planning things well. If I could do it all over again, you can bet I would figure it out a lot better, but in the end it's the marriage that excites me more than the proposal.

With all those hints, she knew it was coming. In fact, she confessed she was reaching around while we were walking in because she wanted to test my inner pocket for the box. Sneaky! She saw me fiddling under the table when I passed her the phone, and thought "this is it." Thankfully, my application fooled her enough to second guess her inclination, so I salvaged a bit of a surprise.

I'm almost embarrassed to post to the world how unromantic my proposal was, but I think all the blunders made it memorable in it's own right... and it's very much me. I focused on the part I liked most, the programming, and assumed the rest would just go smoothly... because... you know, I had wrote a PROGRAM to PROPOSE! ON MY PHONE! I'm now just excited to become a part of her wonderful family, and know that I can spend the rest of my life trying to make her as happy as she makes me.