

Hipmunk wants you (to run our Android development) - kn0thing
http://www.hipmunk.com/jobs

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daemon
Does anyone know what kind of "prototyping tools" they're referencing?

I'm not interested in this position, but I am in the middle of creating my
first Android app and I'd love to know what additional tools might be
available to enhance my workflow (I'm just using Eclipse and JDebug).

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danilocampos
Wow, what a shame. There doesn't seem to be any decent Android UI prototyping
tools. Looks like Keynotopia is working on an Android app but it's not out
yet.

A bunch of wireframe stuff _being called_ prototyping tools, but nothing for
interactivity. We'll update the post, thanks.

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windsurfer
Considering the _initial release_ of the android market was 2 years ago, I'm
surprised you require the candidate to have built "non-trivial Android
applications". Keep in mind that's plural.

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wallflower
I don't think that is an unreasonable requirement. I think they are talking
about a decent 2D Android game or productivity aid or a
ContentProvider/database-driven/synch app (e.g. not something that looks bad,
has no value). And ideally, for a client that was high profile.

Hipmunk's iOS app is awesome. I'm scratching my head as to how you would build
their custom UI in Android with custom views and gestures. A Hipmunk widget to
monitor a chosen 'I-want-to-go-to-X' flight would be of value. I am confident
that they will find the right person and look forward to using or beta testing
it. Android developers are hot right now because most iOS developers are
scared of the Droid/Java/XML (no IB)

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joelhaasnoot
IB sucks, and is XML anyway, just very abstract. Seems if you want to do
anything fancy with IB and custom controls you end up doing lots of your own
code anyway: some things are only possible in code. Other than that: many
Android apps seem to look to replicate their cool iOS look. Foursquare looks
very similar in both platforms, and there's some more examples.

~~~
danilocampos
IB is fine – very handy for setting up tedious things like layout, auto-
resizing masks and the like. Any view, especially full-screen, with major
complexity should start in IB, even if there's plenty of custom action going
on. At the very least, that can be a few dozen lines of label and button
configuration code completely skipped, which is awesome.

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cageface
I'm happy to have IB in my toolbox and it can definitely save a lot of grunt
work but I do think it tends to break down in more complex cases. Just today I
gave up after a few hours of trying to align several subviews in a big
scrollview and did it in code in a few minutes.

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wallflower
The beauty of IB (along with pixel-perfect layouts since there are only 3
devices) is that our designer can checkout the project and skin the app and
not have to touch code. Yes, there are something that IB can't handle (try
passing a managed object context to a view controller in a tab using IB) but
you can do anything you want in code.

In Android, there is no IB. Closest equivalent is someone's project called
<http://DroidDraw.org>. Since there is no IB, it is all code. XML is more code
than meta-data when it comes to defining views. To make an equivalent UI in
Android that is pretty as the iOS one requires a lot more unit effort than in
iOS (and a lot more of that coming from the developer).

~~~
theBobMcCormick
The closest equivalent to IB in Android is actually built into the standard
Android dev toolset (the Android Developer Tools for Eclipse).

Droid Draw has been abandoned for years. The visual UI tools in the latest
releases of the ADT is actually pretty decent. Probably not as good as what
I've heard about IB, but not bad. Certainly better than Droid Draw ever was.

