[android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread Gabriel Simões
I do agree with you that the Apple app publishing restriction is
pushing developpers too far, far enough to see some great developers
give the plataform up not for technical reasons, but for their
principles.

On the other side, as a music app developer I don´t know how you are
happy with Android.
First, a lot of developers (including me) can´t even figure out how to
acquire audio streams from AudioRecord and play them using AudioTrack
without problems such audio chopping, sample rate differences,
distortion, ... (see how many posts without solutions we have here on
this group). We can´t syncronize audio input and ouput, or audio
output and video, so it gets hard to develop apps that need to handle
those events precisely, such as samplers, music games, music makers
based on gestures, etc.
We don´t have a low latency audio interface to access (ALSA would be
great and it´s already working on Android ... but we can´t access it),
so give up virtual instruments and low latency audio apps (small
buffers aren´t available too). We don´t have native audio interfaces
officially supported by Google and AudioRecord (at least running on
the emulator) warns buffer overflows if you just receive audio from it
and play using AudioTrack on the same thread, it doesn´t matter which
buffer sizes you use.

The behavior of the apps running on different devices is unpredictable
while on iPhone, since the archtecture and hardware is a lot more
closely related on different devices and thought to be compatible, it
´s a lot easier to predict, test and publish apps that you know that
will run as great as you intended them to be. On Android this is not
something up to the developers to do, but to Google and the device
developers that should garantee compatibility with the OS and what
runs on top of it.

I´m working on Android mostly because of Apple´s restrictions on it´s
plataform, on publication, on development, on resources usage... But
yes, I think Android still needs to play ball, and play a lot to catch
iPhone + IphoneOS. And I hope it doest it!

On 17 mar, 10:04, niko20 nikolatesl...@yahoo.com wrote:
 First off I like to write music apps, so I keep an eye on the music
 apps that are out for iPhone.

 Two of these really popular apps are BeatMaker and Noise.IO. Beatmaker
 is a sample driven sequencer MPC style, and Noise.IO is a full
 featured FM synth.

 I read something disturbing in the app info yesterday that shows just
 how much power Apple has over developers.

 In the past Beatmaker and Noise.IO had formed a way to share data -
 the ability to export a synth sound out of Noise.IO and import it into
 Beatmaker. It looks like Apple now forced them to change how this
 sharing works - in fact so much so that currently the export feature
 in Noise.IO is GONE! And the lastest reviewers of the app aren't happy
 about it LOL. And the Beatmaker app indicates that import is gone in
 the current update. Imagine LOSING functionality in an update!
 Wouldn't that piss off a customer! Anyway the Beatmaker page mentions
 something about having to switch over to Apple's copy/paste
 functionality instead of the way they were using before, and that this
 was requested by Apple.

 So that makes me feel much better about Android, I think it sucks when
 a product that has been out for a long while already, and now Apple
 comes in and bullies the developers to break their software basically
 for no good reason except they want some control over how stuff is
 done. How obnoxious.

 Also, I dont see how Apple is so groundbreaking. I was looking up
 specs on the iPhone OS 3.0 yesterday, and it didn't come out until
 June/July 2009, this is when it finally got copy/paste, MMS, and Push
 notifications. By the way Push notifications are where an app can get
 notified to start when it receives some data, even though the app
 isn't running. Well, Android was well along the way already back in
 2008 and it had Widgets and Intents, which do this already. Push
 notification is just a widget with an intent basically, and it came
 out much later.

 I am not an Android Fanboy or an Apple fanboy, I always figure whoever
 has the best tech wins in the end, I am writing Android apps and I
 usually compare Apple apps to what I'm doing so I can see if such a
 thing is possible at all processor speed wise, etc. I found that the
 original iPhone processor was actually only running at 412Mhz or so,
 and still has some good music apps, so that gives me a bit of info on
 how those apps are written then. iPhone has objective C and can
 compile to native code, but Android has NDK and you can also use
 native code, so I should be able to still write comparable apps
 processing power wise.

 So reading some of this info made me start to see how Android is
 really ahead of the game in a lot of ways. Back in 2008 it already had
 copy/paste, MMS messaging, and widgets and intents long before iPhone
 OS 3.0..The hardware such as the touch screens still isn't as accurate
 or 

[android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread MobDev
hehe,
another music app developer here, with no decent streaming app
possibilities :(
It's nice to have a MediaPlayer which streams MP3, but thats way way
too limited..
I want it to be compatible with AAC to begin with (because of the
bandwidth), and I definitely would want more control (and maybe
somewhat lessi nterfaces??)...
I mean you are saying it was an advanced platform in 2008, but what
you want to say that it hasn't evolved since 2004, since J2ME MIDP...
A class like MediaPlayer is actually based on that one (which is old
and has never been updated nor up par) with the same functionality !
Even worse actually, the SE devices had a better MediaPlayer
implementation 4 years ago...
My personal experience, after working in J2ME and objective C, has
been of utter dissapointment...


On 17 mrt, 15:23, Gabriel Simões gsim...@gmail.com wrote:
 I do agree with you that the Apple app publishing restriction is
 pushing developpers too far, far enough to see some great developers
 give the plataform up not for technical reasons, but for their
 principles.

 On the other side, as a music app developer I don´t know how you are
 happy with Android.
 First, a lot of developers (including me) can´t even figure out how to
 acquire audio streams from AudioRecord and play them using AudioTrack
 without problems such audio chopping, sample rate differences,
 distortion, ... (see how many posts without solutions we have here on
 this group). We can´t syncronize audio input and ouput, or audio
 output and video, so it gets hard to develop apps that need to handle
 those events precisely, such as samplers, music games, music makers
 based on gestures, etc.
 We don´t have a low latency audio interface to access (ALSA would be
 great and it´s already working on Android ... but we can´t access it),
 so give up virtual instruments and low latency audio apps (small
 buffers aren´t available too). We don´t have native audio interfaces
 officially supported by Google and AudioRecord (at least running on
 the emulator) warns buffer overflows if you just receive audio from it
 and play using AudioTrack on the same thread, it doesn´t matter which
 buffer sizes you use.

 The behavior of the apps running on different devices is unpredictable
 while on iPhone, since the archtecture and hardware is a lot more
 closely related on different devices and thought to be compatible, it
 ´s a lot easier to predict, test and publish apps that you know that
 will run as great as you intended them to be. On Android this is not
 something up to the developers to do, but to Google and the device
 developers that should garantee compatibility with the OS and what
 runs on top of it.

 I´m working on Android mostly because of Apple´s restrictions on it´s
 plataform, on publication, on development, on resources usage... But
 yes, I think Android still needs to play ball, and play a lot to catch
 iPhone + IphoneOS. And I hope it doest it!

 On 17 mar, 10:04, niko20 nikolatesl...@yahoo.com wrote:

  First off I like to write music apps, so I keep an eye on the music
  apps that are out for iPhone.

  Two of these really popular apps are BeatMaker and Noise.IO. Beatmaker
  is a sample driven sequencer MPC style, and Noise.IO is a full
  featured FM synth.

  I read something disturbing in the app info yesterday that shows just
  how much power Apple has over developers.

  In the past Beatmaker and Noise.IO had formed a way to share data -
  the ability to export a synth sound out of Noise.IO and import it into
  Beatmaker. It looks like Apple now forced them to change how this
  sharing works - in fact so much so that currently the export feature
  in Noise.IO is GONE! And the lastest reviewers of the app aren't happy
  about it LOL. And the Beatmaker app indicates that import is gone in
  the current update. Imagine LOSING functionality in an update!
  Wouldn't that piss off a customer! Anyway the Beatmaker page mentions
  something about having to switch over to Apple's copy/paste
  functionality instead of the way they were using before, and that this
  was requested by Apple.

  So that makes me feel much better about Android, I think it sucks when
  a product that has been out for a long while already, and now Apple
  comes in and bullies the developers to break their software basically
  for no good reason except they want some control over how stuff is
  done. How obnoxious.

  Also, I dont see how Apple is so groundbreaking. I was looking up
  specs on the iPhone OS 3.0 yesterday, and it didn't come out until
  June/July 2009, this is when it finally got copy/paste, MMS, and Push
  notifications. By the way Push notifications are where an app can get
  notified to start when it receives some data, even though the app
  isn't running. Well, Android was well along the way already back in
  2008 and it had Widgets and Intents, which do this already. Push
  notification is just a widget with an intent basically, and it came
  out much later.

  I 

[android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread Sundog
Right on point here, all three of you, and representative of the
problems of both platforms. I won't even consider continuing my IPhone
development, but I've had to completely drop several projects I wanted
to do in Android because it simply isn't up to it. Since they're being
nice enough to send me a phone I'll probably try once more, but I'll
choose what I write around what Android can do well (audio-visually),
which isn't much. Margarita Drop was a silly little game but I had to
work like crazy to get it to work as smoothly as it does... no more 3d
from us until things improve.


On Mar 17, 10:26 am, MobDev developm...@mobilaria.com wrote:
 hehe,
 another music app developer here, with no decent streaming app
 possibilities :(
 It's nice to have a MediaPlayer which streams MP3, but thats way way
 too limited..
 I want it to be compatible with AAC to begin with (because of the
 bandwidth), and I definitely would want more control (and maybe
 somewhat lessi nterfaces??)...
 I mean you are saying it was an advanced platform in 2008, but what
 you want to say that it hasn't evolved since 2004, since J2ME MIDP...
 A class like MediaPlayer is actually based on that one (which is old
 and has never been updated nor up par) with the same functionality !
 Even worse actually, the SE devices had a better MediaPlayer
 implementation 4 years ago...
 My personal experience, after working in J2ME and objective C, has
 been of utter dissapointment...

 On 17 mrt, 15:23, Gabriel Simões gsim...@gmail.com wrote:

  I do agree with you that the Apple app publishing restriction is
  pushing developpers too far, far enough to see some great developers
  give the plataform up not for technical reasons, but for their
  principles.

  On the other side, as a music app developer I don´t know how you are
  happy with Android.
  First, a lot of developers (including me) can´t even figure out how to
  acquire audio streams from AudioRecord and play them using AudioTrack
  without problems such audio chopping, sample rate differences,
  distortion, ... (see how many posts without solutions we have here on
  this group). We can´t syncronize audio input and ouput, or audio
  output and video, so it gets hard to develop apps that need to handle
  those events precisely, such as samplers, music games, music makers
  based on gestures, etc.
  We don´t have a low latency audio interface to access (ALSA would be
  great and it´s already working on Android ... but we can´t access it),
  so give up virtual instruments and low latency audio apps (small
  buffers aren´t available too). We don´t have native audio interfaces
  officially supported by Google and AudioRecord (at least running on
  the emulator) warns buffer overflows if you just receive audio from it
  and play using AudioTrack on the same thread, it doesn´t matter which
  buffer sizes you use.

  The behavior of the apps running on different devices is unpredictable
  while on iPhone, since the archtecture and hardware is a lot more
  closely related on different devices and thought to be compatible, it
  ´s a lot easier to predict, test and publish apps that you know that
  will run as great as you intended them to be. On Android this is not
  something up to the developers to do, but to Google and the device
  developers that should garantee compatibility with the OS and what
  runs on top of it.

  I´m working on Android mostly because of Apple´s restrictions on it´s
  plataform, on publication, on development, on resources usage... But
  yes, I think Android still needs to play ball, and play a lot to catch
  iPhone + IphoneOS. And I hope it doest it!

  On 17 mar, 10:04, niko20 nikolatesl...@yahoo.com wrote:

   First off I like to write music apps, so I keep an eye on the music
   apps that are out for iPhone.

   Two of these really popular apps are BeatMaker and Noise.IO. Beatmaker
   is a sample driven sequencer MPC style, and Noise.IO is a full
   featured FM synth.

   I read something disturbing in the app info yesterday that shows just
   how much power Apple has over developers.

   In the past Beatmaker and Noise.IO had formed a way to share data -
   the ability to export a synth sound out of Noise.IO and import it into
   Beatmaker. It looks like Apple now forced them to change how this
   sharing works - in fact so much so that currently the export feature
   in Noise.IO is GONE! And the lastest reviewers of the app aren't happy
   about it LOL. And the Beatmaker app indicates that import is gone in
   the current update. Imagine LOSING functionality in an update!
   Wouldn't that piss off a customer! Anyway the Beatmaker page mentions
   something about having to switch over to Apple's copy/paste
   functionality instead of the way they were using before, and that this
   was requested by Apple.

   So that makes me feel much better about Android, I think it sucks when
   a product that has been out for a long while already, and now Apple
   comes in and 

Re: [android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread Kevin Duffey
I too wanted to work on some audio apps.. I had bought BeatMaker on iPhone,
and wanted to do something similar for Android. It's a blind guess, but
unless the google team has a massive update in 3.0 coming by end of year, I
would guess that we wont get the audio/low latency capabilities of iPhone
for at least 2 years. I can not imagine why, but games and audio, even tho
they are huge on the iPhone, seem to be lacking interest from the Android
team as being important. From the various forum posts I've seen over the
last several months, it seems like the JVM doesn't have a JIT, so its
actually slower than J2ME JVMs although the hardware is faster so it is
probably comparable. Most basic apps run fine, but games struggle to keep
solid framerates up do to the GC issues among other things. With a new
thread that started a few days ago describing other apps stealing cpu/gc
cycles and causing games to hiccup, there seems to be almost no way to
provide a solid smooth game that provides any sort of detail all the time.
I've not personally played any iphone level game on android other than basic
puzzle games, so I am formulating my opinion from various other developers
that have posted these issues.

I would agree that Android is STILL more appealing to write for than iPhone.
I just can't stand the ridiculousness of apple and their changes, forceful
removals, etc. It's crap. I don't care if there are 60 million iPhones and
only a few million android devices... why suffer thru having to work with
objective-c and having to own a mac to write for it, and all their rules..
worrying about whether or not your months of hard work will even get
approved.

but ya, Android has a long way to go to catch up. If they are even trying
to. I don't know if anyone on the android team could comment, but it would
be really nice to get some sort of inclination of what is going on with the
various threads discussed here about the major shortcomings of android. I
would think that android/google would be listening to the developers that
plan to write for it, and thus want to focus resources on things like low
latency audio, keeping background processes from interfering with foreground
real-time games, better 3D support and so on.



On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Sundog sunns...@gmail.com wrote:

 Right on point here, all three of you, and representative of the
 problems of both platforms. I won't even consider continuing my IPhone
 development, but I've had to completely drop several projects I wanted
 to do in Android because it simply isn't up to it. Since they're being
 nice enough to send me a phone I'll probably try once more, but I'll
 choose what I write around what Android can do well (audio-visually),
 which isn't much. Margarita Drop was a silly little game but I had to
 work like crazy to get it to work as smoothly as it does... no more 3d
 from us until things improve.


 On Mar 17, 10:26 am, MobDev developm...@mobilaria.com wrote:
  hehe,
  another music app developer here, with no decent streaming app
  possibilities :(
  It's nice to have a MediaPlayer which streams MP3, but thats way way
  too limited..
  I want it to be compatible with AAC to begin with (because of the
  bandwidth), and I definitely would want more control (and maybe
  somewhat lessi nterfaces??)...
  I mean you are saying it was an advanced platform in 2008, but what
  you want to say that it hasn't evolved since 2004, since J2ME MIDP...
  A class like MediaPlayer is actually based on that one (which is old
  and has never been updated nor up par) with the same functionality !
  Even worse actually, the SE devices had a better MediaPlayer
  implementation 4 years ago...
  My personal experience, after working in J2ME and objective C, has
  been of utter dissapointment...
 
  On 17 mrt, 15:23, Gabriel Simões gsim...@gmail.com wrote:
 
   I do agree with you that the Apple app publishing restriction is
   pushing developpers too far, far enough to see some great developers
   give the plataform up not for technical reasons, but for their
   principles.
 
   On the other side, as a music app developer I don´t know how you are
   happy with Android.
   First, a lot of developers (including me) can´t even figure out how to
   acquire audio streams from AudioRecord and play them using AudioTrack
   without problems such audio chopping, sample rate differences,
   distortion, ... (see how many posts without solutions we have here on
   this group). We can´t syncronize audio input and ouput, or audio
   output and video, so it gets hard to develop apps that need to handle
   those events precisely, such as samplers, music games, music makers
   based on gestures, etc.
   We don´t have a low latency audio interface to access (ALSA would be
   great and it´s already working on Android ... but we can´t access it),
   so give up virtual instruments and low latency audio apps (small
   buffers aren´t available too). We don´t have native audio interfaces
   

[android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread niko20
Yes, agreed on the low latency audio. However I do think this may be
more of an issue with the hardware possibly.  For example, if may
depend on the hardware what kind of audio abilities you get, whereas
in the iPhone they are all a standard set by Apple. But right now the
smallest latency is around 100ms or so buffers, which is way too much
(slow)

Fortunately I'm making apps that really dont care about latency, they
are sample driven (my main app is Electrum Drum Machine), they only
have latency problems when trying to play live with the touchscreen
(and I think some of that latency is from the screen hardware itself).
So for me processor power is most important right now. Having access
to NDK audio would be nice, but not really necessary, since I've found
that calling JNI and passing a buffer back from Native Code doesn't
have as much overhead as most people think, I've had speed increases
of up to 100 or more by doing so, native code is just that much faster
than the Dalvik java!


-niko

On Mar 17, 11:32 am, Kevin Duffey andjar...@gmail.com wrote:
 I too wanted to work on some audio apps.. I had bought BeatMaker on iPhone,
 and wanted to do something similar for Android. It's a blind guess, but
 unless the google team has a massive update in 3.0 coming by end of year, I
 would guess that we wont get the audio/low latency capabilities of iPhone
 for at least 2 years. I can not imagine why, but games and audio, even tho
 they are huge on the iPhone, seem to be lacking interest from the Android
 team as being important. From the various forum posts I've seen over the
 last several months, it seems like the JVM doesn't have a JIT, so its
 actually slower than J2ME JVMs although the hardware is faster so it is
 probably comparable. Most basic apps run fine, but games struggle to keep
 solid framerates up do to the GC issues among other things. With a new
 thread that started a few days ago describing other apps stealing cpu/gc
 cycles and causing games to hiccup, there seems to be almost no way to
 provide a solid smooth game that provides any sort of detail all the time.
 I've not personally played any iphone level game on android other than basic
 puzzle games, so I am formulating my opinion from various other developers
 that have posted these issues.

 I would agree that Android is STILL more appealing to write for than iPhone.
 I just can't stand the ridiculousness of apple and their changes, forceful
 removals, etc. It's crap. I don't care if there are 60 million iPhones and
 only a few million android devices... why suffer thru having to work with
 objective-c and having to own a mac to write for it, and all their rules..
 worrying about whether or not your months of hard work will even get
 approved.

 but ya, Android has a long way to go to catch up. If they are even trying
 to. I don't know if anyone on the android team could comment, but it would
 be really nice to get some sort of inclination of what is going on with the
 various threads discussed here about the major shortcomings of android. I
 would think that android/google would be listening to the developers that
 plan to write for it, and thus want to focus resources on things like low
 latency audio, keeping background processes from interfering with foreground
 real-time games, better 3D support and so on.



 On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Sundog sunns...@gmail.com wrote:
  Right on point here, all three of you, and representative of the
  problems of both platforms. I won't even consider continuing my IPhone
  development, but I've had to completely drop several projects I wanted
  to do in Android because it simply isn't up to it. Since they're being
  nice enough to send me a phone I'll probably try once more, but I'll
  choose what I write around what Android can do well (audio-visually),
  which isn't much. Margarita Drop was a silly little game but I had to
  work like crazy to get it to work as smoothly as it does... no more 3d
  from us until things improve.

  On Mar 17, 10:26 am, MobDev developm...@mobilaria.com wrote:
   hehe,
   another music app developer here, with no decent streaming app
   possibilities :(
   It's nice to have a MediaPlayer which streams MP3, but thats way way
   too limited..
   I want it to be compatible with AAC to begin with (because of the
   bandwidth), and I definitely would want more control (and maybe
   somewhat lessi nterfaces??)...
   I mean you are saying it was an advanced platform in 2008, but what
   you want to say that it hasn't evolved since 2004, since J2ME MIDP...
   A class like MediaPlayer is actually based on that one (which is old
   and has never been updated nor up par) with the same functionality !
   Even worse actually, the SE devices had a better MediaPlayer
   implementation 4 years ago...
   My personal experience, after working in J2ME and objective C, has
   been of utter dissapointment...

   On 17 mrt, 15:23, Gabriel Simões gsim...@gmail.com wrote:

I do 

Re: [android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread Kevin Duffey
One of these days I have to dive in to NDK. I haven't done C code in 12
years.. I am afraid I've probably forgotten all my old C code. Having last
worked with Watcom C/C++ and Borland C++... is the NDK C that much
different? I am wondering if there is a book or something I should get/read
to get a good idea of how to use NDK with android.


On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 12:08 PM, niko20 nikolatesl...@yahoo.com wrote:

 Yes, agreed on the low latency audio. However I do think this may be
 more of an issue with the hardware possibly.  For example, if may
 depend on the hardware what kind of audio abilities you get, whereas
 in the iPhone they are all a standard set by Apple. But right now the
 smallest latency is around 100ms or so buffers, which is way too much
 (slow)

 Fortunately I'm making apps that really dont care about latency, they
 are sample driven (my main app is Electrum Drum Machine), they only
 have latency problems when trying to play live with the touchscreen
 (and I think some of that latency is from the screen hardware itself).
 So for me processor power is most important right now. Having access
 to NDK audio would be nice, but not really necessary, since I've found
 that calling JNI and passing a buffer back from Native Code doesn't
 have as much overhead as most people think, I've had speed increases
 of up to 100 or more by doing so, native code is just that much faster
 than the Dalvik java!


 -niko

 On Mar 17, 11:32 am, Kevin Duffey andjar...@gmail.com wrote:
  I too wanted to work on some audio apps.. I had bought BeatMaker on
 iPhone,
  and wanted to do something similar for Android. It's a blind guess, but
  unless the google team has a massive update in 3.0 coming by end of year,
 I
  would guess that we wont get the audio/low latency capabilities of iPhone
  for at least 2 years. I can not imagine why, but games and audio, even
 tho
  they are huge on the iPhone, seem to be lacking interest from the Android
  team as being important. From the various forum posts I've seen over the
  last several months, it seems like the JVM doesn't have a JIT, so its
  actually slower than J2ME JVMs although the hardware is faster so it is
  probably comparable. Most basic apps run fine, but games struggle to keep
  solid framerates up do to the GC issues among other things. With a new
  thread that started a few days ago describing other apps stealing cpu/gc
  cycles and causing games to hiccup, there seems to be almost no way to
  provide a solid smooth game that provides any sort of detail all the
 time.
  I've not personally played any iphone level game on android other than
 basic
  puzzle games, so I am formulating my opinion from various other
 developers
  that have posted these issues.
 
  I would agree that Android is STILL more appealing to write for than
 iPhone.
  I just can't stand the ridiculousness of apple and their changes,
 forceful
  removals, etc. It's crap. I don't care if there are 60 million iPhones
 and
  only a few million android devices... why suffer thru having to work with
  objective-c and having to own a mac to write for it, and all their
 rules..
  worrying about whether or not your months of hard work will even get
  approved.
 
  but ya, Android has a long way to go to catch up. If they are even trying
  to. I don't know if anyone on the android team could comment, but it
 would
  be really nice to get some sort of inclination of what is going on with
 the
  various threads discussed here about the major shortcomings of android. I
  would think that android/google would be listening to the developers that
  plan to write for it, and thus want to focus resources on things like low
  latency audio, keeping background processes from interfering with
 foreground
  real-time games, better 3D support and so on.
 
 
 
  On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Sundog sunns...@gmail.com wrote:
   Right on point here, all three of you, and representative of the
   problems of both platforms. I won't even consider continuing my IPhone
   development, but I've had to completely drop several projects I wanted
   to do in Android because it simply isn't up to it. Since they're being
   nice enough to send me a phone I'll probably try once more, but I'll
   choose what I write around what Android can do well (audio-visually),
   which isn't much. Margarita Drop was a silly little game but I had to
   work like crazy to get it to work as smoothly as it does... no more 3d
   from us until things improve.
 
   On Mar 17, 10:26 am, MobDev developm...@mobilaria.com wrote:
hehe,
another music app developer here, with no decent streaming app
possibilities :(
It's nice to have a MediaPlayer which streams MP3, but thats way way
too limited..
I want it to be compatible with AAC to begin with (because of the
bandwidth), and I definitely would want more control (and maybe
somewhat lessi nterfaces??)...
I mean you are saying it was an advanced platform in 2008, 

Re: [android-developers] Re: I don't HATE apple, but I found these interesting things yesterday, poor iphone developers.

2010-03-17 Thread David Ashwood
Checkout:
http://oo-androidnews.blogspot.com/2010/02/ffmpeg-and-androidmk.html might
give you a leg up.
http://oo-androidnews.blogspot.com/2010/02/ffmpeg-and-androidmk.html

On 17 March 2010 21:30, Kevin Duffey andjar...@gmail.com wrote:

 One of these days I have to dive in to NDK. I haven't done C code in 12
 years.. I am afraid I've probably forgotten all my old C code. Having last
 worked with Watcom C/C++ and Borland C++... is the NDK C that much
 different? I am wondering if there is a book or something I should get/read
 to get a good idea of how to use NDK with android.



 On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 12:08 PM, niko20 nikolatesl...@yahoo.com wrote:

 Yes, agreed on the low latency audio. However I do think this may be
 more of an issue with the hardware possibly.  For example, if may
 depend on the hardware what kind of audio abilities you get, whereas
 in the iPhone they are all a standard set by Apple. But right now the
 smallest latency is around 100ms or so buffers, which is way too much
 (slow)

 Fortunately I'm making apps that really dont care about latency, they
 are sample driven (my main app is Electrum Drum Machine), they only
 have latency problems when trying to play live with the touchscreen
 (and I think some of that latency is from the screen hardware itself).
 So for me processor power is most important right now. Having access
 to NDK audio would be nice, but not really necessary, since I've found
 that calling JNI and passing a buffer back from Native Code doesn't
 have as much overhead as most people think, I've had speed increases
 of up to 100 or more by doing so, native code is just that much faster
 than the Dalvik java!


 -niko

 On Mar 17, 11:32 am, Kevin Duffey andjar...@gmail.com wrote:
  I too wanted to work on some audio apps.. I had bought BeatMaker on
 iPhone,
  and wanted to do something similar for Android. It's a blind guess, but
  unless the google team has a massive update in 3.0 coming by end of
 year, I
  would guess that we wont get the audio/low latency capabilities of
 iPhone
  for at least 2 years. I can not imagine why, but games and audio, even
 tho
  they are huge on the iPhone, seem to be lacking interest from the
 Android
  team as being important. From the various forum posts I've seen over the
  last several months, it seems like the JVM doesn't have a JIT, so its
  actually slower than J2ME JVMs although the hardware is faster so it is
  probably comparable. Most basic apps run fine, but games struggle to
 keep
  solid framerates up do to the GC issues among other things. With a new
  thread that started a few days ago describing other apps stealing cpu/gc
  cycles and causing games to hiccup, there seems to be almost no way to
  provide a solid smooth game that provides any sort of detail all the
 time.
  I've not personally played any iphone level game on android other than
 basic
  puzzle games, so I am formulating my opinion from various other
 developers
  that have posted these issues.
 
  I would agree that Android is STILL more appealing to write for than
 iPhone.
  I just can't stand the ridiculousness of apple and their changes,
 forceful
  removals, etc. It's crap. I don't care if there are 60 million iPhones
 and
  only a few million android devices... why suffer thru having to work
 with
  objective-c and having to own a mac to write for it, and all their
 rules..
  worrying about whether or not your months of hard work will even get
  approved.
 
  but ya, Android has a long way to go to catch up. If they are even
 trying
  to. I don't know if anyone on the android team could comment, but it
 would
  be really nice to get some sort of inclination of what is going on with
 the
  various threads discussed here about the major shortcomings of android.
 I
  would think that android/google would be listening to the developers
 that
  plan to write for it, and thus want to focus resources on things like
 low
  latency audio, keeping background processes from interfering with
 foreground
  real-time games, better 3D support and so on.
 
 
 
  On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:12 AM, Sundog sunns...@gmail.com wrote:
   Right on point here, all three of you, and representative of the
   problems of both platforms. I won't even consider continuing my IPhone
   development, but I've had to completely drop several projects I wanted
   to do in Android because it simply isn't up to it. Since they're being
   nice enough to send me a phone I'll probably try once more, but I'll
   choose what I write around what Android can do well (audio-visually),
   which isn't much. Margarita Drop was a silly little game but I had to
   work like crazy to get it to work as smoothly as it does... no more 3d
   from us until things improve.
 
   On Mar 17, 10:26 am, MobDev developm...@mobilaria.com wrote:
hehe,
another music app developer here, with no decent streaming app
possibilities :(
It's nice to have a MediaPlayer which streams MP3, but thats way way