Two responses to the listener-feedback show (JavaPosse #313) * Dick and Joe are more or less right about the handling of the remote "clicker" on the iPhone. On iPhone OS 3, the system iPod application owns the clicker, so if you're listening to Pandora / Shoutcast / Last.fm / etc. and you click the headset clicker, your app loses and the iPod starts playing (either the last thing you were listening to or the first thing in your library). Just like Dick says. And it sucks. Like Android, the fix is an API change, meaning that apps need to be updated to handle it correctly. Joe speculated about this, but thought it was tied into the audio session APIs -- the new functionality is actually in the UIApplication class itself. You call beginReceivingRemoteControlEvents, and then you'll get asynchronous events either from the clicker or from the audio controls in the app- switching space.
* More germane to the topic of Java: how should people new to programming learn Android? The guys said, basically, "learn Java first, then learn Android." As an author, I disagree, and I think there's actually a huge opportunity here. Beginners get really turned off by pre-requisites, and are often rooted in a concrete idea of what they want to do. They don't say "I want to learn the collection of skills that I need to write cool Android apps", they say "I want to write cool Android apps." I saw this on an iPhone book I co-wrote when, despite the fact that we (like all the other IPhone books) said "you gotta know C", we had an influx of converts from web programming, Flash, and even first-time programmers, all of whom were gob-smacked the first time they saw a pointer. There was, and still is, an opportunity for teaching the whole kielbasa: learn basic programming with C as your first language and iPhone SDK as the toolset. It's not the easiest place to begin, but it speaks to some people's motivations better than saying "go learn some easy kiddie language, then learn C, and then you'll be ready for iPhone SDK". And that's why I think there's a huge opportunity here for a beginner's Java book that's based on Android and its SDK. Instead of command-line-based exercises that do boring-ass println()s, and an implicit assumption that the reader will be moving on to an oh-so- fascinating career in webapp development, there could be a beginner's Java book that embraces the Android APIs and its SDK from Day One. The reader would learn loops, conditionals, object-orientation and the rest not through artificial exercises, but by putting pixels on the Android Emulator. Plus, standardizing on Android's Eclipse-based toolset (available on Windows, Mac, and at least one dirty hippie OS) solves numerous "getting started" problems that a lot of authors hand-wave around by saying "go to java.sun.com, find the appropriate SDK, figure out how to install for your system, and boy I hope you enjoy working on the command line". I appreciate that there are purists who argue that this approach is going to lead to tool dependency and bad habits, but I've come to realize that beginners are deeply invested in concretes, and that abstraction comes to them later. Trying to lecture a young person -- or someone contemplating a career swap -- on software engineering principles and language concepts just doesn't work. They want results, and I think teachers and authors could try embracing that. The wisdom and the conceptual understanding will come later to those who stick with it. --Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
