haseman

I'm not sure a little stop energy is such a bad thing. I'd say take their views with some salt...but Silicon Valley tends to be an echo-chamber. What's important in the valley isn't always important everywhere else. Unless your business/venture/idea is only targeted at people in the Bay Area, it pays to keep a little attention elsewhere.

There's more to New York than old money on the Upper West Side. I just moved to Brooklyn from the Mission (in SF) and I must say they are very similar. The art isn't as burning man oriented but the hipsters still carry iPhones and I get dragged into just as many conversations about making 'apps'.

Yup! Just moved from San Francisco to Willamsburg. Must say, it's almost the exact feel I got living in the Mission ( was there for 3 years). The other unsung secret here: Many bars have wifi, bad coffee, tables at which to work...and beer.

doubleTwist is hirinig. http://www.doubletwist.com/dt/Home/Jobs.dt

It's not listed but we're looking for Mobile folks too. (Android experience is a plus)

SF or NYC

Looking to comments on an internet post to asses the maturity of a generation is like indexing Hacker News comments to determine the technical prowess of the mid-west. People who write comments on blogs are, by their nature, on the outsides of the statistical bell curve. Just as the average hacker news reader doesn't represent the technical capacity of an average internet reader. If you want to make informed guesses about the state of a generation...please stop reading blogs and, furthermore, stop reading the comments.

12th floor of an apartment building in Woodside Queens. The whole building was swaying.

doubleTwist is looking for experienced android engineers in NYC or SF. email resume/cv to chris at doubletwist dot com

New York OR San Francisco, USA.

doubleTwist is hiring Android engineers. Info at http://doubletwist.com. Email resumes to chris at doubletwist dot com.

doubleTwist is looking for Android engineers in New York and San Francisco. Feel free to email resumes to chris at doubletwist dot com

http://doubletwist.com

Wasn't 'OnStar' supposed to be exactly this service for your car? I guess it morphed into a 'please call the authorities' or 'please unlock my vehicle' service instead.

doubleTwist is hiring. Our office is in San Francisco CA.

http://www.doubletwist.com/dt/Home/Jobs.dt

email: chris at doubletwist dot com

We're also looking (although it isn't listed in the link) for Android engineers.

I'm working (slowly) on the iPhone and Android Augmented Reality kits (open source). We could always use help, check it here

http://github.com/haseman/Android-AR-Kit/

and here

http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/

Gravity Mobile (http://gravitymobile.com) is looking for smart, experienced, engineers with J2ME/BREW/iPhone/Android/WinMo/Blackberry skills. Email to haseman at gravitymobile dot com.

I'm counting down the seconds until we get a comment about how this is "evil"

The fears about Android fragmentation are, in some cases, overblown. The point that concerns me is that this guy has, or has gotten his hands, on every one of those Android devices.

This is a feat that most Amateur developers cannot afford to pull off. It is, however, a feat that any iPhone developer can manage (there are only a handful of devices)

My fear, with platform fragmentation, isn't for the people who do this for a living (I do, and platform fragmentation is just one of the many problems we already have systems in place to handle) My fear is for the people who want to do it as a hobby.

So for us professional folks, the platform fragmentation issue is very over-blown. But if you're a one-man shop who wants to make some mobile software in his/her spare time (for which there is a thriving market on the iPhone) then this is actually a huge hurdle to get over.

Sure, if you have access to all the Android devices, you might or might not have to make code changes to support specific handsets (yet). But if you can't get your hands on every Android device...and you want to develop a paid app in the evenings, get ready for a deluge of angry users for whom your application is just too slow to work. Further, these will be problems you won't be able to debug _until_ you get that email from an angry user.

Google already has a strange split concept of 'users' and 'customers' when it comes to online advertising. I imagine they can split the concept further when it comes to handset manufacturing.

That aside, this is _the_ issue of the Android platform. Apple knows that their 'customers' are the people who purchase the device and not their developers (as any developer who's gone through the approval process will tell you). The question remains...can Google make the same leap?

In my experience, getting an onDestroy() call doesn't mean your process is about to be terminated/unloaded (this may be different in newer versions?)

After you press the 'Back' try holding the 'Home' button down for a second. You should still see the application in the list that comes up. Further, after you receive 'onDestroy()' your activity isn't actually unloaded. It just 'could' be unloaded at some point in the future. Good developers will null all their pointers so the GC can clean up....and we're all good developers right?

While Android might be internally consistant, the hardware drivers that support it isn't. Everywhere your software interacts with the hardware is suspect for fragmentation. Google will have compliance testing to force OEM's into correctly supporting the Android runtime. However, their only leverage is the inclusion or not of their Google Apps and the "Made with Google" logo for the back of the device.

Thanks for the feedback. #3 was meant to be a more than a little sarcastic, but I guess it didn't mesh well with some of the others.

There are really two types of fragmentation. The first is UI screen size, which isn't too hard to work with. The second, and uglier, is code fragmentation. This is where a piece of code might work totally differently on two separate platforms. Right now Android has a lot of the former, but it's looking like there's a lot of the latter to come.

Hey HN, (author of that article here) was wondering if you guys had any general feedback. I'm an evolving tech writer and I'm always looking for pointers.

I agree with your sentiment. Further, new classes have a small (but not immeasurable) hit to performance as each object, when created, must be initialized and tracked in memory.

oops, sorry! not sure how that comment made it into the wrong post.

I'd also add that the people who control salaries at a software company (particularly small ones) are usually not people who understand the development process very much at all.

You keep executing the function because it's on the stack. The program counter keeps moving through the method until it hits a return statement. God help you if you try to reference one of the class' internal data objects as their heap space could have been allocated to something else running on another thread.

Anyone who thinks Google Wave is an email replacement hasn't used Wave either....

It's buggy, slow, and there are some user-interaction cases that just aren't covered. I look forward to it living up to the kind of system it could be, but it just isn't quite there yet. Admittedly, it's still in beta, but I'm surprised... Google's beta's are usually finished products.

I got an early invite to GMail, and it was pretty much functional out of the box. I wish I could say the same of Wave.

Not surprising. The cost of developing for the Android platform is rising: (Multiple screen resolutions, buggy SDK implementations) and the money to be made in this area isn't rising to match. As the platform fragments more (it will) revenue (or people willing to pay for applications) has to rise as well or more than just Gameloft is going to exit the android marketplace.

The Droid's best feature is it's ability to make and receive phone calls in San Francisco

I'm unclear as to how my comparison is invalid. Verizon's Get-It-Now marketplace is a mobile application store as is Apple's iTunes shop. I'm comparing one market to others.

I'm not, by any means, saying that Apple's review process is reasonable, acceptable, or fair. I am, however, saying that, hands down, it's better than every other mobile application market out there.