Ho,
can you tell me why the emulator is so slow?

Drawing an animation on a canvas at 20FPS is quite indecent...
Is there something that I can do to improve performance on the emu?

I'm afraid the only option is running on a device. If/once you start doing OpenGL ES dev you have to anyway as the emulator doesn't come close to handling all OpenGL ES functionality.

So.. I'd say get used to working on one or more devices if you can..

MichaelEGR wrote:I'm afraid the only option is running on a device. If/once you start doing OpenGL ES dev you have to anyway as the emulator doesn't come close to handling all OpenGL ES functionality.

So.. I'd say get used to working on one or more devices if you can..

Android is just another crappy platform to create fragmentation,
I like the power and semplicity it gives to developers, but it's just
another way to create more framentation in the most fragmented world, the mobile OS.

Crappy SDK,
Android is NOT Java,
Android supports only one IDE, it's indecent that there is no official support to Netbeans,
Android is a Google product.

So let me get this straight..

You are judging all of Android due to performance of the emulator?

>Android is just another crappy platform to create fragmentation
>...another way to create more framentation in the most fragmented world, the mobile OS.

I'm building apps that run on the desktop and Android from one code base, I don't know what you are talking about. It's way better than J2ME fragmentation and the nastiness from that world.

>Crappy SDK

It has its faults, but Google got it mostly right; the 2D API can be argued to be better than Java2D. 80% engineering and the additive process has its downfall, but such is life. I don't think Google is capable of anything besides 80% engineering though; as a whole they seem to lack discipline despite all the brain power there...

>Android is NOT Java,

Who cares? Are you arguing that because Dalvik VM is not a JVM that this has some sort of great significance to your usage of Android and the Java based SDK.

>Android supports only one IDE, it's indecent that there is no official support to Netbeans,

I use IntelliJ Idea perfectly fine for Android dev though I use Ant and the command line tools (ddms/debugger) instead of the built in Idea based tools. I don't like tie myself or depend on any built in tools. There is no reason you couldn't do the same using NetBeans (if somehow that is your favorite IDE / shudder), Ant, and the command line tools.

>Android is a Google product.

And Java is an Oracle product now.. Yech... That enough is a good reason to diversify for me and expand skills into the Android world.

And it's free and widely available for the most part. If Google takes Android in a direction that is not appropriate it will be forked.

Android is great for me because all of my years of real time app / game dev on the desktop works perfectly fine on Android devices and it's mostly cross-platform. Android will also provide the OS for my own hardware efforts.

Not much to hate there... Except the early growing pains due to 80% engineering and some regression issues... Things should smooth out soon enough though.

Suggestion: Go back to making J2EE apps w/ NetBeans on the desktop.. Um cause I was just offering you the best advice on how to proceed with dev on Android via recommending on device dev if you are concerned about performance.

No need to argue,
I'm just saying that there is no need of another Java good/bad clone in this world:
Windows Phone 6,
Windows Phone 7,
Symbian OS,
WebOS,
Maemo,
Meego,
Bada,
Blackberry.

None of those OSes depend on a significant Java based SDK as the primary development platform nor are they even clones of Java. Besides there is a well functioning support for native C/C++ development with Android as well.

Why you even list Bada as a serious contender over Android is beyond me?

Android has significant worldwide momentum as of late that doesn't seem to be slowing down. The larger market will decide the fate of OSes & platforms and Android doesn't seem to be heading towards the bottom end like some of the OSes in your list (WebOS for instance; Palm is going to be dead soon enough quite likely).

You seem to need to do lots of homework or are a troll...

sblantipodi wrote:Ho,
can you tell me why the emulator is so slow?

Back to your main question, it's because the code you run is interpreted by Dalvik VM, which runs on Android flavor of linux that runs on arm cpu, which (finally) is emulated by the SDK. Something like that. So no wonder it's kinda slowish. It gets to be translated 2 times before it's actually executed.

Frankly, once it's running, it's quite ok for me (I guess it depends on your pc). And if the stuff you are running on emu is sluggish, then it's likely that it's gonna be sluggish on real device (OpenGL ES aside).

And as for fragmentation. I for one welcome the diversity in mobile world. I can't imagine the situation when there would be only one (THE right of course) platform. Imagine the world where Windows Mobile is the only mobile OS, and not the 6.5 version, but the one of the older ones. Why not 6.5? Because MS would have no incentive to improve the OS, when it's the only RIGHT one. That kinda world would suck, don't you think?

And for game developers for example, it's getting better and better. Most new devices with modern OSes support OpenGL ES, so it's possible to target multiple platforms with mostly the same code (at least in theory).

Just my 3 cents.