As any self respecting Time Lord will tell you, some points in time are fixed, and some are in flux. I like to think of my time in the same way (any excuse for a Doctor Who reference!). Certain things in my week are fixed – like being at work 9 to 5:30, being in church every Sunday, sleeping during certain hours etc. That time is easy to manage, but it’s all the rest of your time that presents an issue.

One approach is to always do the most urgent and most important thing first. The trouble with that is that some things, like having a social life, are never urgent, but are vital to build into your schedule. Another approach you might take is to have a weekly schedule, but you’ll soon find that it can become restrictive. I find that none of my friends work to much of a weekly schedule, so trying to fit any socialising in requires flexibility. I don’t even try to get ‘x’ number of hours of project work into a month, but I just go with the rhythm of life.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working to get my church’s new website live. It’s taken up a lot of time, and I pushed hard, meaning that I didn’t have time to work on my app, and I socialised a bit less than I would usually. But I’m fine with that. What I’ve come to realise is that there are chunks of time when your emphasis on where you spend your time will shift, and that’s OK, because that’s how life has to work. One of the best bits of advice I was ever given about time management was to think of balance as a pendulum. It’s easy to get into micromanaging our time, trying to make the pendulum as still as possible at all times, but you need to let it swing out. For me, the pendulum has been on the church website, but this week it’s been swinging back towards Rizer. I’m hoping to launch the pixel art app before the year’s out, which will require a lot of time and effort to be invested in the next few months. But there’s also plenty of other things I have planned in that time – like spending quality time with my family. The pendulum will swing backwards and forwards, one week will look very different to the next, and that’s OK.

So embrace the pendulum. It’ll lead to a healthy, balanced, guilt free lifestyle, where you don’t burn out, but keep on making awesome things for many years to come.

As an entrepreneur, optimistic risk taking is part of my character, but I’m aware that I need to watch out for the ‘grass is greener’ mentality, which will ultimately cripple my ability to produce anything. The culture of today certainly feeds this dangerous way of thinking. We tell ourselves that newer is always better, and fill in the unknown with the best possible scenarios.

It’s like when a teenager meets a cute member of the opposite sex for the first time, and it’s “love at first sight”. Before they’ve leant anything meaningful about the other person, they’ve filled in the blanks with their dream guy or girl, and it’s the dream they’re falling in love with. Or take the recent expectations set for the new iPhone’s announcement. There had been so much speculation, filling in the unknown with the unrealistic, that people were disappointed when they saw the 4S. In reality, though, the iPhone 4S is a great improvement – the press just over hyped it, knowing nothing of what it was really like. I’ve done this myself many times, too. I remember seeing the trailer for Jumper and thinking it looked awesome – what a massive letdown it was when I actually went to see it at the cinema!

As indie developers, we can easily fall into this trap too. When we get to the stage in a project where the honeymoon period is over, and the hard slog lies ahead, every other idea for a new project seems way more appealing. We imagine all the highs of starting again with something fresh, of releasing something awesome and raking in the sales, and forget about the endless debugging, the hard slog and the negative reviews. We’re so quick to convince ourselves that the new is better, and so we jump ship. But then the same thing happens on the next project, and the next, and we end up never releasing anything! I’m not saying not to be optimistic – quite the opposite. I believe wholeheartedly that the best is yet to come, but you can be optimistic about what you’re working on now. The danger is in the endless cycle of jumping from project to project, because you believe it will make everything better.

So how can you avoid this happening to you? Well, in the first instance, you need to pick your projects carefully. Make sure that it’s small, manageable and something that you’re so passionate about that you’re happy for it to become a part of who you are. Make a note of all the reasons why you think this project will be awesome, and tell yourself on a regular basis how great it will be when this thing ships. Then tell everyone else. Tell your friends what you’re working on and get them excited. Blog about it and tweet it. Do whatever you can to make not finishing painful and embarrassing. Then when the urge comes to abandon the project – and it will come sooner or later – fight it with all you’ve got. Remind yourself why you started it in the first place. And count the cost of starting something from scratch.

Of course, there are some times when it’s the right thing to do to abandon a project. If something that made it a great idea when you started no longer holds true, then maybe you should call it a day. But the majority of the time – and I’m talking to myself as much as anyone – you should keep going. Don’t give up easily – the grass really isn’t any greener atop the fields of new ideas. The best thing you can do is ship a product. Who knows what you could be missing out on, and what you’re denying the world of, by giving up on something that had the potential to be great, just because things got hard.

Apparently Winston Churchill used to end nearly every phone call with the phrase KBO; it stand for “Keep Buggering On”. Wise words!

I think this reflects really well with what I’m doing with my pixel art app. What I’ve found is that I keep thinking about how much I really want to use the app right now, but it doesn’t exist yet, so instead that drives me on in creating it. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that I’ve only been working in it for a month so far, as progress has been pretty decent given my full time job and other commitments. I think a lot of the reason for that has to do with the motivation of getting the app done so I can use it. Here’s a look at the latest mock-up.

Obviously the hope and expectation that the app might make some money is motivating me too, but it’s very secondary. I have a theory — which I have no way of proving — that in the long run, the financial rewards from of creating what you need the most and are most passionate about will be greater than if you are constantly trying to chase after money making ideas. It’s about creating value, not chasing cash. When you create something of value, that fills a need you have, you’ll be creating value for other people too.

Maybe my theory about the financial rewards being greater isn’t accurate; but even if that is the case, the rewards will still be greater. If you create something valuable to you, the worst case scenario is that you end up with that tool at the end. Even if no-one else buys what you’ve made, the project was not a total waste of time, and you’ll be proud of what you’ve made, because you will have done the best job you could possibly do. I find that this constant reminder that I’m going to be using my app a lot, means that I’m even more of a perfectionist than usual. But if you make something you don’t care about, hoping to make money from it, and the idea flops, then you’ve done nothing but waste your time, effort and money.

I also think it means I’ll actually finish this project. I’ve tried the projects where I’m just chasing after money, trying to get rich quick, and I’ve never actually finished one of those projects because they’re just so draining, and never fun. Chasing money is no way to build a business either, as far as I can see. If you build something of value, sure it might take longer to get off the ground, but it’s then that you’re building to last.

My final thought on this subject is that I want to love what I do, and do what I love. The dream right now is to go full time with Rizer (ok, the dream’s way bigger, but you’d think I’m crazy!), and when I reach that point, I want to be able to leap out of bed in the mornings, pumped about what I get to create in the day ahead. But if I’ve reached this point by making apps just because I think they might make a quick buck, with no passion invested and no desire fulfilled, then what’s the point? I may as well still be working for “the man”, because money will have become my boss. Screw that!

Make the app you want to use. Make the game you’d love to play. Create value, don’t chase money.

This week I went to Aberystwyth, a small seaside town on the coast of Wales. Why on earth would I do that? Well, for iOSDevUK of course! I was there speaking on developing for other platforms, which got some really positive feedback from. I was also making the most of being there, attending and meeting a huge range of cool and inspiring people. Thanks to everyone who helped make that a great event.

I’ve made some fairly decent progress on the pixel art app, including switching layer visibility and a range of design improvements. Not a lot to show yet, but I’m happy with progress so far. Hopefully by the time I do my next post, I should have something vaguely usable.

Tach Tip — Hard Pixel Scaling

I was asked in my last blog post how I do the pixel art in my new game. Well, firstly, just to be clear, I am working at the perceived resolution, not device resolution. So all of my assets work at 240×160 resolution, and I scale things appropriately. In cocos2d, you can simply put:

[self setScale:2.0];

on your layer, but that will leave you with blurred edges as it is by default antialiased. To counter act this, for each texture I load in, I’m calling

[[sprite texture] setAliasTexParameters];

To simplify this process, I’ve simply subclassed CCSprite and added this behaviour. I’ve done this in such away that means it’s still possible to add new layers at full resolution, which I’m planning on doing at some point.

Quote

“Build a business, not a startup”

On my way to Aberystwyth, I listened to ReWork by the guys at 37signals. It’s a great book, and a great antidote to the startup mentally so prevalent in our industry. There’s a lot I could have pulled out from it, and I really recommend that you get hold of a copy. Talking about building a business, not a startup, they talked about how we should be in it for the long haul, building something profitable and sustainable, rather than looking for the out before we’ve even started. This got me thinking not just about Rizer as a whole, but about the various projects I work on and release. I want what I’m building to last many years into the future, which means I want to build products that I’m really passionate about, and will be happy to support and update for many years to come. And as a company, I want Rizer to be an entity that outlives me, that I can pass on to future generations.

Tech Tip: Two Finger Scrolling In UIScrollViews

Tech tip first for those stumbling in from El Goog. I recently needed to make a UIScrollView that didn’t pan when a single finger is dragged over it, but instead passed this action onto it’s child view. Not as simple as you might think! You can’t intercept touchesBegan, because it never gets called if the pan gesture is detected. There are some solutions out there that subclass UIWindow and do some crazy stuff – I think this solution is much nicer. The approach is to subclass UIScrollView, and modify the pan gesture recogniser that the scroll view already has to require a minimum of two touches:

- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame
{
    if(self = [super initWithFrame:frame])
    {
        for (UIGestureRecognizer *gestureRecognizer in [self gestureRecognizers])
        {
            if([gestureRecognizer isKindOfClass:[UIPanGestureRecognizer class]])
            {
                [(UIPanGestureRecognizer*)gestureRecognizer setMinimumNumberOfTouches:2];
            }
        }
    }
    return [super initWithFrame:frame];
}

I should point out that I haven’t submitted any apps with this code in to the App Store, and we’re cutting pretty close to some private APIs, However, as we’re not explicitly calling any of them, I’m pretty sure that it’ll be fine.

Update: A Job, a Game and an App

In my last post, I talked about how I was looking for full-time work. Since then, I’ve started working for a company that specialises in NFC developing BlackBerry apps. Having been there a few months, I still think it was a good move, and things have worked out pretty much how I anticipated (although BlackBerry development is slower and more painful than I could possibly have imagined). Working on my own projects in the evenings took some getting used to, but now I’ve got into the flow of things, I’m finding that actually I can get quite a bit done. Of course it’s still frustrating that I can’t work on Rizer projects all the time, but frustration can be a great driving force.

I’ve found that being motivated to work in the evenings requires that I need to be exceptionally passionate about what I’m creating. At the point of going full time, I was working on a phoenix game, and didn’t really know where it was going, so it wasn’t long before I came up with something new. What I’m now working on is a multiplayer, turn-based murder mystery game. As the idea stands, one player will be the murderer, trying to hide clues in the mansion, while the others search for clues trying to find out who the murderer is. There are a lot of unknowns in how all that’s going to work, but that’s part of the fun of game development!

I chose to make the new game in pixel art, and I’m so glad I did. I’d always avoiding using it in the past as it’s so heavily used by indies, but I’ve really enjoyed making the assets so far. Having to carefully consider each and every pixel, and what shade it will be to give the right suggestion of what it’s representing is a real challenge, but I know it’s making me a better game developer. The amount of pixel art I’m going to need is pretty daunting, and now that I’ve got a shiny new iPad, and given that the iPad is so great for drawing, I went looking for a pixel art iPad app. There are a couple that look ok, but I fancy creating my own, so that’s what I’m doing. I forgot how quick, easy and fun UIKIt is to develop with. After a couple of evenings of work, I have some simple editing functionality, with the ability to select a colour from the image, paint in that colour, erase, and zoom in and out keeping everything nice and pixelly.

Quote

I’ve been watching Kevin Rose’s Foundation videos, where he interviews a range of entrepreneurs asking them how they got started. One of the things that really stood out for me was in his interview with Second Life Founder, Philip Rosedale, giving advice on being transparent.

“To the level of where it hurts, tell everybody.”

Stability

I’m at a stage of life where I have very few outgoings and no dependants, but not knowing when the next project is going to come in, or when the client will pay the invoice, or how long the bank transfer will take is not much fun. I never started out with a financial buffer, which I think has compounded issues when things have come in late. The thought of getting paid every month on the same day without fail makes financial planning so much easier. And with that stability I know I can plan things for the future, rather than stare into the great unknown.

Structure

I always found that having a big freelance project on the go meant that everything else would go out of the window. I’d think to myself that if I just blitzed through this, then I could have loads of time to work on my own project after it was all signed off. Of course, things always took longer than planned, by which time the next project would be in. Or, as recently, things would be unexpectedly quiet and catch me off guard without a plan for what to develop next. While I’ll always be at work during the daytime, I’ll always have evenings and weekends. Knowing this will give me a predictable pattern to work on my own stuff, which will make planning and making deadlines a whole lot easier.

Money

Life is about a lot more than money, but having more money is no bad thing! I’ve done the calculations and the wages I’m looking at are more than I’d be making if I had a constant influx of freelance projects. iOS developers are well sought after and well paid.

People

I thrive in a team, bouncing ideas and problems of other people. It’s been just me on my own all day for long enough.

Experience

One day I want to run my own company. So far in my career, I’ve worked for one company for five months and that’s it. I’m looking forward to seeing how a small, innovative company works and learning all I can from them, which I’m sure will be invaluable later on in life.

Inspiration

There are so many people in the indie dev world that work full time. Making games for them is not just a hobby, but a passion. They stay up late, plot out ideas on their commute to work and come up with some awesome stuff. Many of them have output more games than I have in the last 15 months, and some have even been met with great success allowing them to leave their jobs and make games full time. Every one of them is incredible in their own way, and if they can do it, then so can I.

I have no doubt that this next season is going to be a challenging one, but so was the one I’m in now. Both freelancing and working for someone else full time have their good sides and bad sides: they’re just different. One thing I want to make absolutely clear is that I’m not giving up, slowing down or backing off with Rizer. I’m still going to be making games, and more and better games than have come before. Flying Cats Game: Metro — a brand new free version — will be out soon, along with a major new update to the main game. Then, after that, I think it’s time to really push on with the next game and make something really special.

“I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” — Henry David Thoreau

Work for hire always sucks

Having read up on what the Johnny Two Shoes boys had done in the 3 to 4 years since starting, I noticed that they had quite a few client projects in the mix for big names like Channel 4. As someone who freelances making non-game apps, I wondered whether this might be a good direction to head in, and I still think it might be a good direction to head in as a stepping stone, but Max and Josh helped me to realise that that’s not the end goal. The truth is making games for someone else limits your creative freedom and never has as much earning potential as you could have making something you want to make. Stressing out with deadlines working on stuff you don’t enjoy doing just isn’t worth it. The guys say with the success of Plunderland, they’re now done with freelance work — good for them!

Make the game you want to make

You’ve probably seen similar advice before, but I think it’s worth repeating as it’s an easy trap to fall into, particularly when success eludes you. Don’t try and copy someone else’s game or make something that you think other people might enjoy but you yourself won’t. Make the game you want to make — the game you’d enjoy playing. That’s what JohnnyTwoShoes set out to do with Plunderland, and Max told me he still plays it on the tube because he enjoys it. This has the effect of making the game really fun for you, and if you find it fun, there’s a good chance other people will love it too.

Marketing is overrated

Journalists only want to write about stuff from people they already know: people who are already popular. Once you’re at that point, then they’ll be asking you if they can review your app, not the other way around. Knowing the right people obviously helps, but the really key thing is to make a game that people will talk about.

It takes time … keep going!

Max mentioned he’d been making games for 13 years, which is quite impressive for someone in their mid-twenties. We talked about how Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game that they made. Whatever looks like an overnight success from the outside always has years of working away unnoticed preceding it. I think the best advice I got from Josh and Max was just to keep going. Keep making games you love and build on the experience gained from each one. Nothing happens overnight, so I need patience, passion and determination to keep going.

Thanks again to Max and Josh for taking time out to meet with a random guy who follows them on Twitter! You guys are awesome.

I probably don’t have the best track record when it comes to making original games. Brainz is the numbers game from Countdown, and Flying Cats started with the thought that I could make something a bit like Fruit Ninja. My new game, at least initially, is going to be similar to a Wii Party mini-game and will take place in a world inspired by Studio Ghibli films. The question in my mind is is this a bad thing to be doing?

It would seem that being similar to existing games certainly doesn’t hinder success. When Tiny Wings got popular, people started pointing to other games with a similar mechanic that already existed but few people had previously heard of. Harbour Master was a deservedly successful game, made by Keith and Natalia who are loved and respected by the indie community, but it did attract more than a couple of comparisons to Flight Control. But both are great games in their own right. Even Donkey Kong bears a slight resemblance to Space Panic.

Truth is that there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything is some form of evolution of what has come before, and there’s nothing stopping two people having the same idea either. I wrote a brief for a game idea I had at the end of last year that looked like this:

“The idea is for an side-scrolling iPhone game where you must avoid the rain and stay dry. Rather than jumping on moving platforms, you must pay attention to what happens above you and time running for cover. The above action will involve various monsters that go about their daily lives in the world above, but will stop rain from falling beneath them. It will also combine RPG elements, by being able to spend gold collected on power-ups.”

Imagine my surprise when I saw The Rainy Day appear on the App Store. So many aspects of my idea are in this game, from the concept, to the wet-gauge, to the background story. They just made it less awesome. No matter how unique you think your idea is, someone could easily come up with something similar.

I’ve said before that originality shouldn’t be king, but our primary focus should be on implementation. That’s not to say we become rip-off merchants, and I think you can trust your conscience to tell you when that is what you’re doing. Whatever unique and amazing idea you come up with, there will always be parallels to be drawn with other games. And that’s OK. We make games out of who we are — they are creations that reflect us, our personality and our likes and dislikes. Who we are is made up everything that we’ve experienced, watched and played. So if your game starts to look like something you’ve seen before, don’t freak out — it’s all part of the creative process. Just make sure that the end product is great in it’s own right.

What is it?

In terms of hardware, the TouchPad is more like an iPad than anything else coming to market, with a 1024×768 9.7 inch display, although it’s more powerful than the iPad 1, with 1GB of ram and a 1.2GHz dual core processor. What makes this a bit more interesting is that it’s running the highly acclaimed webOS, which shows up iOS in some areas like notifications and multitasking.

Unfortunately I’m still waiting to be added on to HP|Palm’s early access program so I haven’t actually been able to look into the tablet specific tools. Rather than wait endlessly, I’ve taken a good look at the current tools as well as researching into what’s to come.

Technologies

webOS itself is a propriety Linux based OS that uses WebKit for all of it’s interface. This means that all of the apps are written using web technologies – namely HTML, CSS and JavaScript. At first this sounds like it’s going to be extremely limiting, but the more you listen to the thinking behind it all, the more it kind of makes sense. And it’s actually not too bad to develop for, although JavaScript is a long way from being my favourite language. The current framework provided to you for app creation is called Mojo, which will be supported as far as possible in the future, but it’s about to be superseded by a completely new one called Enyo. So maybe if you’re thinking of learning this side of things it would be best to hold off a little while and jump straight to Enyo.

Now web technologies clearly aren’t going to cut it when you need high performance, so you can use the PDK to create plugins that run natively. The PDK can also be used for making games using OpenGL and C++. There are several stories of respected indie game devs like Mike Kasprzak and Phil Hassey porting their games to webOS in a matter of a few days. It sounds like it’s easily done if you wrote portable code.

Tools

Again, there are many options here. If you want to use an interface designer and code in your web browser, you can use something called Ares. Ares is certainly innovative, but in my experience it wasn’t really that usable. Eclipse is pretty much the official desktop SDK, but there seem to be a lot of people using lots of different tools. I used Espresso, as I’m used to using it for web dev (although I don’t rate it very highly) and found a plug-in for it. Emulation is done using VirtualBox and Palm has done a lot of work to make things nice and simple for developers. Debugging is done in the terminal and works well, giving good descriptive errors when things go wrong. I did find myself longing for compile time errors though, but maybe with a better IDE I would have had fewer issues.

Documentation and Resources

The documentation for webOS is really good, and there are tons of ways to learn. I watched the Stanford lecture series on iTunes U, which was very helpful indeed. There are also Palm podcasts, forums and an active IRC channel to help you out. The SDK gives you all of the source code for the apps that ship with the devices, like email, messaging, the browser etc. which I found myself using a lot to work out best practices and what type of element I needed to put where.

Costs

There’s no sign-up charge, and no charge to submit an app. What’s more, if you ask nicely, HP will send you a test device for free. I’m told my Pre 2 (worth a fair few hundred quid!) is on it’s way – thanks HP!

Review

4 star – HP|Palm really are proving that people other than Apple can make a decent operating system with decent development tools. In some ways things aren’t as nice as developing for iOS, such as the tools and the languages used, and in some ways they’re even better, like the free devices and more human support. I would definitely recommend that you consider developing for webOS, and if you’ve created a game for the iPhone using portable code, then porting should be very straight forward. I, however, used Objective-C and cocos2d for Flying Cats, and after a couple of days wondering if I could use Cocotron to compile the Foundation libraries for Linux with an ARM processor, I gave up! Maybe that’s possible, but probably not worth it.

Of course, if you’re so inclined maybe you could make a game using entirely web technologies. I can see this being a good option for people without much programming experience, who are a bit daunted by cocos2d and Obj-C memory management. You could quite happily make a game that makes use of all the cool stuff in WebKit, then ship it for webOS, iOS and others.

Final thoughts

I’m glad that I finally found another mobile operating system where the development tools didn’t completely suck. Having said that, is cross platform development really the way forward for tablet apps? One thing I’ve only briefly touched on is market share. Currently, the PlayBook, all of the Android Honeycomb tablets and the TouchPad have a combined 0% of the tablet market share, because they’re not out yet. Apple created a new class of device with the iPad, and what’s more is they seems to have done it cheaper than other companies are managing to a year later. Everyone else is playing catch-up, and I can’t see anything that will make any of these new devices really stand out against the iPad. The trend that we’re already starting to see is that the term “iPad” is becoming synonymous with “tablet”, much like “iPod” is synonymous with “mp3 player”. The iPad is still untouchable, and Apple are about to up their game again.

I probably sound like a bit of an Apple fan-boy, and truth be told, I am. I love OS X, I love iOS, I love the apps and the innovation we see, I love the development tools, and I’m probably on my own with this one but I love coding in Obj-C! There’s simply no compelling enough reason for me to want to do develop for anything else right now. So will I be developing across multiple platforms in near future? Sure I will: for iPhone, iPad and OS X.

Android Tablets

There have been a few tablet devices that have come to market already that run the same version of Android that you find on phones. These have generally been smaller screen devices, such as the 7 inch Samsung Galaxy Tab. What we’re about to see, though, is the new generation of Android tablets running Android 3.0 – a.k.a. Honeycomb – which has been specifically built for tablets. Perhaps the most notable of these, and the most imminent, is the Motorola Xoom. The Xoom boasts a 1280×800 widescreen display, a 1 GHz dual core processor, and 1 GB of RAM. The other forthcoming Honeycomb tablets look to be similarly specced, which may ease the pain of developing for multiple devices, at least in the short term.

The Tools and Docs

In general, it would seem that Google have some very good documentation, and so far there hasn’t been any part of the process of getting set up for development that I’ve been stuck on. However, installing the tools you need is very clunky and slow. The process involves downloading a Java app that connects to the Google servers and gives you list of options for what you can install. I just went for all the defaults and things seem to work OK. You’ll also need to download Eclipse, and install the Android plug-in. Although Eclipse isn’t your only option for an IDE, it seems that most people are using it. There’s plenty of sample projects bundled in to browse through, although I found errors and warnings in the code I loaded.

So far things have been OK, but far from perfect. It seems to me that Google are happy that things are good enough. The experience for developers may not be as polished as it is in Apple’s camp, but it’s passable. With one exception, that means I haven’t been able to do any Android tablet development at all.

The Emulator

When I’m developing for iOS, I use the simulator 90% of the time, and only check on the device occasionally. Being able to quickly deploy to the simulator rapidly speeds up development – perhaps other people work differently, but I’ve found that doing all I can in the simulator is a good strategy for being as productive as possible. Of course, when you’re dealing with devices that haven’t shipped yet, the simulator is your only option. And the Android emulator is woeful. Here it is:

You probably all think I’m dumb for not noticing that it’s rotated wrong, but actually there’s a bug that means that that’s the orientation the emulator is stuck on. But your main problem is that it’s unusably slow. The interface runs at something like 1 frame per second with memory warnings all over the place. There is literally no way you could develop an app using this thing. According to Google:

“Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer, emulator performance is slow. We’re working hard to resolve the performance issues and it will improve in future releases”

Now I’m no architecture genius, but it strikes me that this is a lame excuse. Apple, HP and even RIM have managed to work out how to get a fast performing emulation of their platform on a computer, by compiling it for the native architecture (I think…). What’s stopping Google doing the same? There are signs that emulator performance has been an issue for previous generations of the OS too, so I don’t hold out a lot of hope that it will improve that much.

I’m sure there must be some big technical issues, and I hope it does get better in time. Of course the other option is to hedge your bets and shell out for a tablet, hoping that it pays off, and that nothing else hinders your progress. And in fairness, you should really be testing on a device anyway.

The real issue in my mind, though, is not the emulator. It’s the fact that Google thought it was good enough to ship it as it is and waste everyone’s time who tries to develop for it. I get this constant feeling that third party developers in the Android world are thought of as second rate citizens, and their general approach is “that’ll do – it’s only for the devs”. That’s not an environment I want to work under.

Review

1 star – has potential but really needs an update! Even then, when factoring in the stories you hear from people already developing for Android, as well as platform fragmentation, and distribution and monetization issues, there are just too many things making me nervous. Android has been a very popular choice in the mobile phone market, but looking at the OS and the cost of the devices so far, I see no reason why that should continue in the tablet market. I guess time will tell, but I have absolutely no immediate plans to be developing for Honeycomb, and I’d advise anyone looking into it to at least wait a few months to see how things pan out.