Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarycrusader | Hacker News Reader

As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat".

Asus can make great hardware all day; but without the right marketing and the right software, it will never be successful.

Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) is the first arrival of a real competitor to iOS in my opinion.

Google floundered about quite a bit trying to get the UI right (honestly, it seemed like they were ignoring it completely for a while); and 4.0 and 4.1 are the first versions I've used that feel "right". I'm actually pretty torn between iOS and Android at this point from a user / developer standpoint.

Although Apple still has the better developer tools for now.

View on HN

Although Apple still has the better developer tools for now.

I agree that the supporting tools like Instruments are much better and Android doesn't have anything to compare to Interface Builder but the better Java IDEs like IntelliJ are so far ahead of XCode that it's not even funny.

Things are going to get interesting if Apple really does release a 7" tablet. I don't think they're going to get away with just scaling down iPad apps. Maybe that's why they were emphasizing the new dynamic layout stuff at WWDC this year? Manually positioning three completely different UI layouts for each app isn't going to be much fun.

There is an IntelliJ based IDE for iOS development: http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

I think the dynamic UI layout is more for the iPhone 5 which based on rumours will be longer than the current iPhone e.g. 320x600. The iPad Mini is expected to be 1024x768 so all iPad apps will work without any changes needed.

AppCode is definitely much better than XCode. I'm using it right now, in fact! Jetbrains has done a great job with it.

But IntellIJ is still much more powerful. It's much much easier to build really powerful refactoring tools for a language like Java than it is for Obj-C.

I dislike Xcode 4 as much as anyone else, but I was watching WWDC sessions today (and yesterday) and it seems that they've fortunately improved Xcode, LLVM and LLDB a lot.

The new LLDB is almost 20 times better than anything GDB could hope to be. Xcode 4 is pretty, but gets a zero mark on usability (you have to do a lot of things by mouse). Xcode 4.5 has been vastly improved usability-wise. If they keep up their work, I'm sure Xcode could finally be a decent and usable IDE, rather than just being pretty.

I love XCode, much prefer it to Visual Studio and especially Eclipse, which is just awful.

Just for curiosity is XCode able to support C and C++ as good as Eclipse CDT does, and without crashing every few hours?

Xcode 4's C++ support is actually pretty good. It supports most of the C++11 features. It still crashes on me pretty often but it's much better than it was.

In fact, C++ is just about the only reason I still use Xcode for actually writing code. My apps that don't need C++ are all written in AppCode.

However, AppCode's C++ support is also improving so it may not be that way for long.

I am surprised you put up with an IDE that crashes.

What stops you from using Appcode in your c++ projects?

I think that's why I don't care about IntelliJ; I'm primarily a C/C++ developer. I also have a strong aversion to buying development tools.

XCode 4's tight integration with LLVM, a Debugger, online documentation, and code completion are the reasons why I use it instead of something else.

Eclipse is satisfactory for Java development though, so I'll probably be happy enough with it when I do Android work.

As Doug Fisher said at JavaOne, "hardware without software just generates heat"

The same has been said for functional languages without side effects: "A purely functional programming language is only good for heating your computer." -- Rich Hickey :)

Actually, you don't need to execute it at all if there are no side effects. You might as well turn the machine off and save all the electricity.

Heating your computer is a side effect.

For full documentation on this effect, please see the Haskell Heat-Monad package.

In the book Permutation City, people are just able to upload a copy of their brains into a computer. But the simulations are so big that they run slowly. So a billionaire not only uploads a copy of his consciousness, he also runs a massive optimization routine on it! After a few years of chugging along, the optimizer spits out an empty file and reports: "This program has no output."

Yes, but this article (and others of its ilk) aren't saying that Google software and ASUS hardware together make a great device. Instead the storyline seems to be that only Google, Apple and Microsoft can make great hardware, even in this case when it's mostly a re badge of a previously announced product.

Hardware running Java generates a lot of heat too ...

Same thing for Crysis ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com