Been doing Android dev full time for a few weeks now. I have to say I’m enjoying it. I also put myself through iOS training and have been doing some of that. Really enjoying that too.

I think I’m fed up with web apps, and all the arsing about you have to do to get things going and stoping useless bastards breaking your site. I can just fire up an IDE, and I’m there with mobile.

Beginning to think that the web will become the cloud (ha ha) sooner or later and most things will generally run as native mobile apps talking to servers (that used to be web servers). This will also take web apps away from the current Jesus-it’s-JavaScript-with-bouncy-shit car crash, the (web) interfaces will become simple again, because most of the time you’ll only go onto a site where a phone screen is too small to do something complicated.

I have to confess that I’m not missing Scottish Ruby either. I’d like to be there, but I’m enjoying writing apps in Objective-C and Java. I like the feel of this. Rails is becoming an over-complicated PITA to install and run. I mean, WTF, we replace JavaScript with something we can’t even debug? Please!

I’ve also discovered that my hatred of Java is really a hatred of J2EE and all that shoot yourself in the head dependency injection crap. For putting GUI components together in a coherent way it’s fine. But this makes sense, as it was originally designed to run set top boxes, and build desk top GUIs with Swing. It was only because it was the new kid in town and the web was new at the same time that it ever got popular, i.e. it was the only place to go for corporates who didn’t want to go the Microsoft route. But it was designed by a committee of computer scientists who’d didn’t understand what real people need, so it was always going to suck as much as the MS stuff. Sigh.

I’m not missing Ruby. I’m not missing BDD. I’m writing simple apps with a much faster turn around. Fuck me. I’m having FUN. Who’d a thunk it? Ruby was fun, it was radical. Rails made the web much easier and quicker. But now? I’m just bored by it, dunno why. I like to get things in the hands of folk who need them. Don’t care about the pedantic stuff. In fact the computer science types have taken over again. Sigh.

If you want to create a ListView adapter that searches on the string arbitrarily I’ve created a gist here, by the way. Enjoy.