Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thesteg 5702 days ago
Software is one side of the coin. The other side is hardware and developers are dealing with different screen sizes, different sensors, different keyboards and so on. Compared to Apple's iPhone, you have to spend a lot of time making your app work on every device.
1 comments
vetinari 5702 days ago
Different sensors do not enter the picture, unless your application uses them all (99% of them don't). Different keyboards do not enter the picture at all. Different screen sizes are handled very neatly since 1.6.

Any other questions?

link
thesteg 5702 days ago
Most applications don't use any sensors at all, yet you have to deal with the situation if you plan to use them. And there is a big difference in designing an application for devices having only a touchscreen keyboard and devices having a physical keyboard.
link
vetinari 5702 days ago
The sensors situation is the same on all platforms - if you want to use them, you have to handle them. If not, just ignore them. How is that more complicated on Android?

The difference with keyboards - the original point was "all the keyboards" (i.e. HTC IME, Swype, etc), not just hardware vs software. When you prepare your application for software keyboard, whether pan-and-scan or resize, it will just work with hardware keyboard (opposite is slightly more complicated: when you assume only hardware keyboard, then the software keyboard has surprises in layouts for you).

Getting OT: sometimes I wonder, how people could handle PCs 20 years ago. You had CPUs with different speeds (286 to 486), different graphics cards with different resolutions (EGA, VGA, SVGA), operating system that didn't abstract the differences and yet the PC was considered single platform, much more successful than competing unified platforms. There wasn't rampart rationalization against "fragmentation", like today.

link
RyanMcGreal 5702 days ago
>sometimes I wonder, how people could handle PCs 20 years ago.

They didn't. That's why the Mac was a runaway success and the fragmented PC marketplace floundered.

link
cromulent 5702 days ago
> You had CPUs with different speeds (286 to 486)

We had the turbo button back then. Maybe we need a turbo button on the Android. You could call it the "Anti-Frag" button.

</facetiousness>

link
stretchwithme 5702 days ago
Just getting the ASCII art right back then must have been the toughest part.
link
thesz 5702 days ago
>Different keyboards do not enter the picture at all.

I think, this is not completely true: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860578

Different keyboards lead to different users experience with application.

link