Very similar lifestyle as when I was a student - small apartment, eat in most days... but couldn't be more satisfied with my "job" :=)
HN user
njern
I work at Walkbase (www.walkbase.com), building location-based services of all kinds.
As you rightly point out, the more correct solution is of course to use unsafe.Sizeof()
Please let me somehow sign up and get an e-mail when a new learning path (like data analysis) becomes available. Great job on the site :)
Author here, any questions or comments are welcome :)
How about letting me try it out without registering? :)
What I meant was that the current system feels like Paint while I would like something with the power of Photoshop.
Sorry for the confusion, English isn't my native language :)
You have a valid argument. My only excuse is that this is the first (publicly available) post-mortem I've written.
The answers to the questions you bring up have enough material for a blog post of their own, so I'll most likely end up doing a follow-up to this blog post where I address them.
Thanks for the feedback!
I can definitely recommend Jackson. Performance is stellar and it's easy to use.
It does make your APK a bit bigger (in our case, about 20% of the APK size comes from Jackson) so if you're only going to be parsing very little JSON, you can still make do with JSONObject.
Don't take me wrong, I'm not a proponent of being "dumb" with performance either. However, I'm perfectly okay with using the standard libraries like JSONObject & AsyncTask until they prove to be too slow.
Thanks to a decent architecture the usage of JSONObject was confined to just a few methods that had to be refactored. There were a few more AsyncTasks we had to switch out, but in the end the refactoring took about two days which I would find to be perfectly acceptable "losses" compared to researching the performance of every single class before using it.
I definitely see where you're coming from though and I'll be sure to not throw that quote around without a better explanation in the future (at least on HN).
Did you ever try to give a button one or two rounded corners (not the whole object, just some of the corners)?
Turns out that for pre-3.1 it will round the wrong corners (http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=9161), meaning you need "corrected" drawables for API level 12+
That's one example of things that definitely made the whole XML experience a little trippy for us.
There are a bunch of different solutions to this problem being explored. Being able to give provide location context-specific services in your applications is something that I personally think is going to be a huge thing in the next few years.
My current company is actually providing developers with a service (currently Android only) to provide better location contexts in their apps.
If you're interested you can take a look at our homepage from my profile. We just launched our public beta this week so if this sort of thing interests you as an app developer, please check it out :)