Well, I figured out how to write an application for the Android platform and how to push it onto the market. And now I’m facing the problem that many developers found themselves facing when the Android ecosystem introduced support for multiple display capabilities on devices. Yup, the application that looked great on my Nexus didn’t appear on my friend Dan’s HTC Tattoo market. I added support for the device and now the application looks a bit crappy on both.
The images on my phone are now tiny and on the Tattoo are all jammed up together. This is caused by the fact that the images sizes are set to 100 pixels across. I’m going to have to rethink how the pictures are sized and use the display width to figure out the proper width for the images. In retrospect this is what I should have done in the first place, but hey, I believe in learning through doing and you can’t learn without making mistakes.
So, onto reading about density independence and the other joys of supporting multiple screen types.
Ah, you see the problem of Android. WIndows Phone 7 will have much tighter controlled hardware specifications so this shouldn’t be a problem.
So Windows 7 devices will all be clones.
No room for innovation?
😉
Well, it’s not really a problem is it?
I mean, if a young developer came up to your complaining that he built a brilliant website on his computer which looks like crap on yours because you don’t have a 1280×768 screen display, is that a problem with the platform?
It’s tantamount to arguing that Android developers are disadvantaged because they have to learn OOP before building an app.
In reality, the ability to target different devices with independent hardware is a positive not a negative for the platform. My app will run fine on a tablet, but if I use my original premise that all icons should be 100px across, it’s my fault if it looks bad.
@Dan .. Wasn’t Windows Mobile 7 called Kin or something? I thought M$ had given up on that
(tongue in cheek of course)