Who Needs IDEs?

At Google I/O this year, Google introduced it’s new IDE, Android Studio. Android Studio is based on IntelliJ IDEA, a great IDE that many of my Android friends use.

I wasn’t particularly excited by this announcement because, for the last several years, I’ve given up IDEs. My development environment of choice has been Sublime Text 2 and ant.

Sure, IDEs can be extremely useful, especially in Java, where boiler plate code is the name of the game. But I found that they (Eclipse especially) were getting in the way more than they were helping. I was able to get reasonable reflection based code completion using the great SublimeJava plugin, and I found ant builds from the command line to be amazingly more reliable than anything I could do with Eclipse.

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Last week hosted the latest iteration of Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O. Google I/O is where developers and enthusiasts go to get all of the latest news about Google’s latest offerings, from Android to Chrome to their Cloud backend.

For the last two years, I was one of those developers that got to spend a few days a year with many other extremely brilliant people and learn a ton about new technologies. Unfortunately, this year I, like many others, wasn’t able to get a ticket.

I recently realized that part of the reason that I learned so much at Google I/O is that I had a few days where I didn’t have to worry about anything else and got to absorb the sessions and really spend my time taking it all in.

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In January of 2013, I finally decided to make the leap and start my own consulting business. It’s only been 3 months since then, but I’ve already learned quite a lot from the experience.

After reading a recent article on Inc.com I couldn’t help but feel a little offended and reflective on my own experience in the workforce.

One thing that I’ve come to realize is how much more productive I feel now that I’m working for myself. It’s not just that I feel productive, I get projects done faster, build better stuff, and have learned an amazing amount in the last three months to become a much better programmer.

As I thought about why all of this might be it dawned on me that a big part of this new found productivity is that I’m no longer wasting my time on meaningless things.

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There are a lot of great apps on mobile devices these days, made by a lot of great people. Many, if not most, of these apps use various open source libraries for features or backwards compatibility. This is excellent, but we have to make sure that we give credit where credit is due.

Open Source is Great

I have always been a big proponent of open source. Not just software, either. I love the idea of open source hardware, and even open source house plans. I love the idea that, if only people would share what they created, we could all work towards the common good.

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The Android APIs are filled with things that don’t quite seem right.  I’ve always been annoyed by the lack of relationship between interface elements.  For instance, isn’t a ListView really just a special case of a GridView with only one column?  Yet GridView and ListView aren’t directly related, so we get oddities where I can add header and footer views to a ListView, but not a GridView.

One thing that seems to trip people up is the Button class.  Android has a Button class for text (and images if your not really concerned with formatting them) and an ImageButton class for images.  Like the ListView/GridView situation mentioned earlier, these two buttons are not, in fact, related.  Button inherits from TextView and ImageButton inherits from ImageView.

This tends to trip people up when it comes to seemingly common elements like a button with both image and text centered.

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When I started working from home a few months ago, the first thing I needed was a comfortable workspace.  I’ve been using the same small IKEA desk since college, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. What I was after was a clean, elegant, and modern workspace that would provide me with a lot of space without taking up a lot.  I really like the idea of a dual workspace desk rather than two desks because I felt that it would allow for more desk space, more leg room, and, overall, be a cleaner look.

The Prototype

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Hashnote was recently featured in an article at MakeUseOf.com about simple note taking apps.  Check out the article at the link below.

In the world we live in today, basic computer understanding is a must have.  The folks at code.org have made this excellent video which really shows why everyone should learn to code and how easy it really can be.

The biggest question that I hear is “Where do I start?” and my answer is always the same, just start.  You can spend years worrying about which language is best and what your first app is going to be, but none of that is really important in the long run.  I think the most important part is that you start and get the basic idea of programming.

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It’s only been three days since I launched Hashnote for Android and I’ve gotten lots of great feedback.  Though the app is released and doing great, I don’t plan on taking any breaks.  With that in mind, I’ve spent the time since Hashnote’s release to develop a small update to include a DashClock extension.  This lets you choose a hashtag, I use #remember, to be displayed in DashClock on your lock screen.  That way you have, at a glance, all of the things you need to remember. It’s making it’s way through all of Google Play right now, but check it out as soon as it’s available.