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by wallflower 5432 days ago
You've really nailed it here. The way I look at it, though, is that it is easier to become competent at iOS development because of the ability of the framework to support robust code and the sheer number of worked out examples. Being an Android programmer means that you've gone through your apprenticeship where you've spent hours if not days with ContentProvider, RelativeLayout, AsyncTasks, Handlers and maybe even ConcurrentLinkedQueue(s).

Most of my iOS developer friends have no desire to learn Android. That is what makes Android development hot - as you have very little overlap of iOS and Android. Believe me, I've paid for attempting to switch back between iOS and Android with splitting headaches (if not done on separate days). I don't believe people who specialize in both.

You left something off your list, the sheer insanity of async loading images into a ListView. iOS developers have EGOImageView, we have a few competing implementations, including writing your own.

> I am of the opinion that in order to build a stable, robust app, Content Providers, at the very least, are required (for many reasons,

One way to see if someone knows what they are talking about is to ask them about multi-table content providers.

Also, what phone does the candidate have in his or her possession...

1 comments

Google provides an ImageLoader library. It kinda sucks, and occasionally causes Application Not Responding errors or out-f-memory exceptions in my company's apps, but there's nothing better that's open-source. I wrote something pretty cool at my previous job that unfortunately probably will never be open-sourced that pipelined and cached image fetching, and supported a responder-chain like pattern for handling the images, as well as decoding it to a limited size rather than fully decoding into a full-sized bitmap and then resizing, as that would occasionally fail due to the bitmap decoder deciding to return null sometimes - probably in low-memory cases.
For our most recent project, we took GreenDroid and extracted its AsyncImageView stuff, removed or changed GD dependencies, and changed to a SD file based cache. The GreenDroid open source code supports many of the concepts you mentioned, including the responder chain.

The SKImageDecoder returning null is a pain.

Thanks for your reply. Check out http://droidux.com (just saw a tweet about it)