Poll: how long have you been into D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sat, 6 Jul 2013 14:08:20 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> I resisted "upgrading" to a "smart"phone for many years (people used
> to laugh at me for carrying around such a prehistoric antique -- to a
> point I took pride in showing it off to the kids), until the battery
> life started to wear out and require charging once a day. Finally I
> succumbed to my phone company who kept bugging me about upgrading
> (and of course, I chose an Android instead of an iPhone). Well, it's
> nice to upgrade, I suppose, but I found that I *still* have to
> recharge once a day 'cos of the battery drain from all those advanced
> "features" that were never there in the old phone. Sigh...
> 

Yea. I don't accept that "smartphones" are really phones. They're PDA's
with telephony tacked on. Not saying that's necessarily a bad way to go
- it's fine if PDA is your primary use-case. But if you're mainly
interested in a phone it's not only complete overkill, but also the
wrong set of design compromises.

They do, like you say, soak up ridiculous amounts of battery power too.
Especially Androids. Maybe it's all the VM/dynamic shit. I did
generally get a couple days out of the iPhone (as long as I didn't play
Rage), instead of the "just *barely* one day" I got with the Nexus S
(even with the cellular stuff disabled). That may not sound too bad to
some people, but with the phones, the near-daily recharging got to feel
like an enormous ball-and-chain (not to mention *trying* to turn off
the damn sound globally every night so the stupid things wouldn't wake
me up for notifications and other shit that I don't care about when I'm
sleeping). I already have enough shit to do every time I go to bed and
wake up, I don't need that added to my daily overhead.

I was *sooo* glad when the project I was doing ended and I got to send
back the damn things (they were loaners) to the guy I was working for.
Although, I probably will pick up a used WiFi-only Android at some
point for development and because an internet-connected PDA does come
in handy. I just wish that instead of Google iClone they were running
some sort of PalmOS 9 or something (a modern version of the Palm Zire
71 with a multi-tasking wifi-internet-capable version of PalmOS 6 would
make me geek out). And with a proper resistive screen and built-in
stylus slot, none of that imprecise capacitive shit. And *real* freaking
buttons (Even Android's gotten rid of the few buttons they used to
have.)


> At least Android actually has a task manager that lets you kill off
> misbehaving apps and things that shouldn't be running that are taking
> up 50MB of RAM for no good reason. On my old iPod, I'd have to
> hard-reset every few days 'cos some misbehaving app would soak up
> 100% RAM and 100% CPU and the thing would brick.

Yea, that's one of the zillions of things that bug me about
iOS/Android: There's no equivalents to the taskbar or "close program"
buttons. Sure, they both have something that pretends to be like a
taskbar, but on Android it tosses in "recently used" stuff with no
indication which ones are actually running. And on iOS - well, it
*might* be working like a taskbar, but honestly I never could really
tell what the hell its semantics were. I was always just *guessing*
that it was the list of running programs...which made me wonder why it
would (apparently?) keep freaking *everything* I was done using running
in the background (at least, as far as I could tell).

They're too damn opaque.

At least Android actually has a decent task manager. It's just too bad
you have to dig so far to get to it, which prevents it from being a
real taskbar substitute.


> *And* I can actually
> write my own apps for Android without needing to buy a Mac just to
> install the dev tools.

Amen to that.

BTW, if you don't mind using a proprietary toolkit (Marmalade:
<http://madewithmarmalade.com>), you *can* develop iOS stuff without
ever having to touch a Mac. But to put it on your actual device you
still have to pay Apple's Developer iRansom (well, or better yet
just jailbreak the stupid thing instead). Last I heard you do still
have to use a Mac to submit to the App Store, and again, you have to
use that one particular proprietary toolkit (which also means no D), but
at least it's *possible* to make iOS stuff without putting up with OSX.

> 
> The only thing missing now is a working D dev environment for Android.
> Once I have *that*, then perhaps the "smart" in "smartphone" will be
> forgiveable, for once. :-P
> 

Yea, I really look forward to that, too.