Today has been an awesome day for me! For the first time I’ve taken an idea (albeit a very simple one), written a program, deployed it for others to use (although not all in one day), and enjoyed as users gave feed back to my work, good and bad.
Although I agree with Jason Ankeny’s article over at Fierce Developer, “Five things all iPhone and Android developers need to know“, I think he misses one very important key feature that Google’s Android platform has over the iPhone. And that is giving developers the ability to create and run background processing. This is important to developers because it allows for more seamless client-server communication.
Well I’ve gone and done it! My first Android application has been deployed to Google’s Android Market. Jumpy is a rendition of the classic peg game where you win by removing all the pieces from the game board. A piece is removed when it is jumped by a selected piece.
So grab your G1 and head over to the Android Market and download Jumpy, let me know what you think and give Jumpy a rating (good or bad). Lot’s of more features in the pipe, but I wanted to get something onto the Android Market so I could learn the process.
Thanks a bunch for your support and helpful critiques, hope you enjoy!
Just as the title suggests, first post from my new G1 Android phone from T-Mobile/HTC/Google. First thoughts…I love it!
Sure there are some rough points in some of the workflows, the music player is one guilty party, and writing this post has not been easy.
But that’s what I luv about it! As a developer I see lots of potential!!!
Back to posting via the laptop!
This is totally my own opinion and I don’t expect anyone to agree, but I feel that Google will do much better with Android Market then Apple does with its app store. I believe this because Google intentionally created a mediocre (albeit functional) end user experience for the Android mobile platform whereas Apple slaved long hours perfecting the iPhone’s core applications. This is by no means meant to diminish the effort by Google’s engineers, whom I greatly respect, nor do I have any proof for the previous statement (I’m sure the Google developers had many a long night and weekend), but if you will give me a couple moments of your precious time I will lay down why I believe this is a better position for Google to take.
OK, onto the initial post for my foray into Android and Ruby on Rails. This basic application assumes you have Ruby on Rails 2.0 installed using MySQL and the 1.0 Android SDK.
I am by no means an expert in Ruby on Rails, and am still learning the Android API and SDK, so if any of you ninjas/rockstars/experts see something that needs correction or a better way of doing things, I’d greatly appreciate the tips.
Other posts on this subject include:
Message Drop
Message Drop Trial
Jumpy
