dailylicious!
Android is arguably the largest smartphone platform on the planet in most part due to having multiple vendors offering different flavors of it across many different models. If joining the green army is your thing, Google’s home for developers is a good place to start.
Sandboxing means restricting access, in this case, limiting the abilities of apps to perform functions that may affect how the larger environment operates. It also blocks apps that require access beyond the user space. For example, an app like SuperDuper which copies the entire hard drive for backup purposes would be blocked from the Mac App Store. Apple’s argument is that sandboxing improves the security of its system and it’s actually a valid one although some may think otherwise.
Developers are still allowed to distribute their apps outside of the Mac App Store but given Apple’s increasingly more restrictive approach to application distribution, who’s to say it will block non Mac App Store apps for security reasons eventually?
If you’re a Mac app developer, it’s something for you to think about.
Sometimes I ask myself the question: why do I develop for iOS? I could also do Haskell development, do cool HTML5 stuff, or build compilers. As an indie developer, these are some important reasons for me.
High-end platform
The iPhone and iPad are the high-end of the smartphones and tablets….
Recently, we released the Android version of Meridian, our platform for building location-based apps.
We didn’t use one of these “Cross Platform!” tools like Titanium. We wrote it, from scratch, in Java, like you do in Android.
We decided it was important to keep the native stuff native, and to respect each platform’s conventions as much as possible. Some conventions are easy to follow, like putting our tabs on the top. Other conventions go deep into the Android Way, like handling
Intents, closing oldActivities, implementing Search Providers, and being strict about references to help the garbage collector.Now, our platform leverages HTML5 (buzzword, sorry) in many places for branding and content display, so we got a fair amount of UI for free. But there was much platform code written in Objective-C that needed translation into Java, such as map navigation, directions, and location switching.
So, we rolled up our sleeves, downloaded the Android SDK, and got to work.
