No, I don't have an iPhone. Thats right! No iPhone here. Why you say? Well, I dunno...it just never was all that exciting to me. I'm always skeptical of hyped up products, not to mention Apple's first, and even sometimes second, generation of a product tends to have its fair share of problems. So once I heard about Android and the "Google Phone" I decided I wanted to be a rebel and go the way of the nerd. I've had the phone for about four or five months now and I have to say I'm an extremely happy G1 owner. Sure its not the most "jazzy" OS for a phone, but I'm not the type of person that needs to be wowed by the user experience, especially when I look at my phone as simply a tool for accomplishing simple tasks, not being constantly entertained. At any rate, now happy and comfortable using the platform, I've decided to start teaching myself how to make applications for it.
I haven't got too far in depth with the SDK yet, but I'm rather pleased to see some vague similarities between an Android project and a Flex project. The first, and most obvious, similarity is the XML based view definitions and other external resources. Second, I've never written Java before but I'm picking it up very quickly. A few friends have already told me that ActionScript 3 and Java are very similar, but I had no idea it would be this easy. The most difficult thing for me at this time is just trying to remember all the considerations you have to make when writing an application for a mobile platform. The book I've got my hands on, Professional Android Application Development, has done a great job of outlining what to think about when writing an Android app, but I highly doubt I'll remember it all come time to write my own app. Alas, thats all part of getting into a new platform.
In the future I hope to write a bit about my experience learning the platform and perhaps provide some unique advice for any other Flash developers looking to get into it. Who knows, maybe I'll have an application available on the market some day!
Oh, and Marc will hopefully be getting into iPhone development soon too.
One Response to “From Flash to Android? Sure, why not!”
That’s another platform I really wish I had time to play with – along with XNA, Unity3D, iPhone, JavaFX etc etc. It’s an exciting time to do creative technology, right? Good luck with it man – the fact that it’s JAVA is definitely appealing vs. objective-c / c / c++ for iphone. both c# and java are no-sweat for most Flex and experienced Flash guys.