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by cloudwalking 5643 days ago
>Android is better for being able to develop on your platform of choice (though I suspect developing on Mac is best supported)...

Quickly like to point out that Eclipse on OS X is atrocious.

3 comments

I think it should be mentioned that you most definitely don't need to use Eclipse to develop for Android. If you don't like Eclipse, both of the other major Java IDE's (NetBeans and Intellij) have Android plugins. And, since all the important tools can be run from the command line, really any text editor will do. I wrote my first Android app entirely in Emacs. If you're an OSX user, TextMate would probably be a great choice for Android development.

Also, as I believe the article points out, with Android (or MP7) you can run your development environment in a VM of our choice on top of whatever you normally use as your desktop OS (I do my Android development in an Ubuntu VM on my Windows XP laptop). That's not practical for iPhone development. Putting together a "FrankenMac" is very cumbersome, the resulting VM tends to be unstable and fragile, not to mention that it's against the license agreement for OSX.

When did you last try Eclipse on OS X?

I personally prefer Netbeans over Eclipse and Ubuntu or even Windows over Mac OS X, but Eclipse on Mac has become very usable since about two years ago. (I think there are still some problems with keyboard shortcuts, but I'll blame them mostly on OS X, not Eclipse.)

I've been using Eclipse for the last three years, more heavily in the last year (Android development). I find it to be incredibly slow, to the point where it becomes unusable. After a couple hours, switching files takes 2-3 seconds, code hints take 4-5 seconds, etc. Very painful.
Agreed.

I could never find an IDE for java I liked on OS X. Eclipse is ugly, buggy and crashes every few hours. NetBeans is better, but not by much.