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Comment by vipivip | Hacker News Reader

It was sarcasm.

It may be sarcasm, but WP7 is quite a bit different than WinMo 6. Different tools, different design, etc. Developing for WinMo 6 wasn't a hardship, if you knew most of the windows APIs. That said, you had to develop using a lot of familiar Windows APIs.

WP7 is supposed to be cleaner. I don't use it currently, but will be interested when I have the chance (probably later this year).

In a sense, each platform requires that you "adopt" their platform of choice. iOS - OSX, WinCE - Windows, Android - Eclipse (and you aren't going to tell me Eclipse is actually superior to OSX or WinX or Linux -- it is bloated, kludgy, and has it's own quirks -- but it is the easiest platform for android dev)...

That said, the worst mobile dev. platform I've ever used was Symbian. On Windows it was a jumble, on *nix/OSX it was a trip into insanity.

Actually, with the exception of the visual layout tools, I find IntelliJ better in just about every way than Eclipse for Android coding. And it's so much better than XCode 4 that I wouldn't know where to start enumerating the differences.

I know a lot of people are happily coding Android apps with Vim or Emacs and command line tools too.

Are you referring to the IntelliJ community edition? I program on the 3 major smartphone platforms (iOS, Android, an WP7) and Android is perhaps the most painful with Eclipse. I'd be interested in IntelliJ if I could use the free version (but I don't see any reference to Android)

The feature comparison here http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m... shows that Android is supported in the Community Edition (free version)

Yeah. Android development is completely supported in the free version. Give it a shot. I've been an IDE hater for most of my career but IntelliJ really does increase my productivity.

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