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Search - "mobile keyboard"
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I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:
1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!
2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.
3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤
5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!
6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.
7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.
8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.
9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.
If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.
To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!
End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!
#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative16 -
received a bug report from a client on a mobile app.
title: bug on information page.
description: all text field make first letter capital.
*what! this is your keyboard, stupid!
after he didn't understand, I made a text change listener, and make the first letter lowercase, he is happy. heheh 😨3 -
If you ever cooperate on a feature like this as a developer, I will find out where you live, drug you just enough to make your body limp, and mutilate your genitals with my keyboard.
Fucking sexist pricks, assuming I want to play with the blue robots and not the pink dolls. Fuck all of them.
Actually, fuck all your retarded cablecutting VOD services with your awful recommendation engines. Fuck your lack of proper playback features, fuck your bloated mobile apps, fuck your vendor lockins, fuck your region locks.
I'm back to pirating, and I'll just buy a pile of merch, trot proudly through the office with an Adventure Time backpack and a laptop full of Steven Universe stickers.33 -
Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.
Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.
Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.
Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.
Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.
Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.
Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.
Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.
Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.
Designer: Unlikely
Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.
Designer: … Ok then.
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It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.10 -
Dev Badass Rant
There are two occasions really:
1) For our C++ project in the third semester, we had to build any kind of C++ application. Guys in team of 4-5 built record keeping systems and calculators and one even made a Tic-Tack-Toe app. My friend and I, just the two of us, made a simple program that plays Rock Paper Scissors with you. With the power od OpenCV, it used the camera to track your hand movement, predicts your next move using contours, and displays the winning move as the computer's move.
For example, if you play Rock, the computer would predict that you were gonna play rock and display paper as it's move. It wasn't perfect, but it was ours, right from scratch. When it worked at the presentation, I was swell with pride. 😂
2) I was interested in game dev so I started Unity. The first tutorial in Unity you find is the web series by Unity about rolling a ball. You simply make a platform and control the ball with your keyboard and the camera follows your ball. You also make pick ups and get points based on that. So I started there, finished the tutorial, added a few walls, made edible and non edible pick ups, dimmed the entire scene, adjusted the camera angles, transferred controls to mobile gyroscope and added a few other things and voila! MazeBall was born. It has only one level and I thought it was pretty shit.
I decided to show it to a friend and when I showed it to my mate (the one who I worked with in the C++ project), my other classmates saw it and were impressed. Like so impressed a couple of them transferred it to their phone and took home with them. 😂 Was inspired to improve.4 -
In middle of debugging an issue. Phone rings. While picking up mobile accidentally falls on laptop keyboard. Next thing I see is BSOD. Shows SYSTEM_THREAD_ERROR_NOTHANDLED. Are you serious?3
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I work at a school and am involved in building the new website. Specifically as an ex Web developer myself I am acting as intermediary between the leadership team and the company we have hired to build the site. The company has a "the customer is always right" approach and will do what they are asked for so my main role is stopping the school from making stupid requests.
For example yesterday they complained that the site looked different on mobile compared to desktop. Then they complained that the (long paragraph) welcome message appeared below the menu and quick links on mobile instead of above them (forcing users to scroll down to get to navigation controls). After many more complaints and mind boggling suggestions, and my attempts to explain responsive design and reducing cognitive load, I left the meeting with a headache and an urge to spend the next three hours drowning Lara Croft.
The most difficult part of any developers role: not throwing the keyboard at the client every time they say something stupid.1 -
I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3
Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.
I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.
So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.
So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.
That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3
Microshaft WanBLowS.
I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.
Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.
At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.
So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.
Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.
That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.
(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)3 -
Imagine: It's the year 2109.
You pay a subscription of $2.00/week to be able to shut off your alarm.
You open up your laptop and after watching 5 un-skippable ads, Windows 35 boots up so you can start working.
You start VSCode and it requires you to watch an ad, to boot up.
You pay a subscription of $29.99/month to get full access to your keyboard.
You pick up your mobile phone and you have to pay a subscription of $49.99/month to be able to unlock your phone as many times as you want.
Your mobile network allows you to make 1 phone call free for the day, post which you have to pay $1.50 per call. Data costs are seperate and its sold to you as a package, labled as an "Offer".
Your salary is compared to peanuts even though tech has gone beyond its limits.
Life is Good.12 -
So I log into a great new site with my development machine. 64G of RAM, and 2 hex core CPU's; GTX 1070 video, SSD, etc. 4K display screen. (Motherboard is 5 years old, not trying to brag, just give context). I regularly put 8 pages of text on the screen side by side. Split ergonomic keyboard.
It wants me to load a mobile app for "full access".
Yea, why look at the world with wide open eyes when you can view everything through a cardboard toilet paper tube and type with your thumbs???
== John == -
Using the company's desktop computers to solve cryptographic puzzles (like mining) on the company's computers while the boss and someone from the IT were asking to have a look on the machine after one guy already snatched my keyboard.
Very scary moment indeed but surprisingly it turned out: the real reason why they came was because a techadmin recently removed a shared system account but some faulty clients kept flooding the servers with outdated login credentials which also triggered mass SMS on the mobile devices.
Luckily I could somehow take an opportunity to remotely call the script which pulled the emergency brake which I prepared to shut down everything. Close call.
Nowadays I think it itsn't worth to take the risk just to do something that could also be done with the own home computer even it takes five times longer. -
Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.
iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.
After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.
When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.
iPhone actually cured me.
MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.
Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.
I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.
iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.
True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.
I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.
Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.
Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.
Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.
Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.
It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.
Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.
Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.
Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.
Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.
Before I switched, I defended Linux.
My life was a lie.
I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.33 -
I don't think ive seen any company go CRAZY™ over a feature the way Msft did with Bing Chat/AI.
Prominently put in Edge desktop. In YOUR FACE in edge mobile. In Skype.
Then they thought, no no no not enough, and put it on SwiftKey. On a goddamn keyboard. And just now saw some "search bar" hanging on in the middle of my desktop after I closed the browser like those Windows 7 widgets.
They realllllly want you to use it -_-8 -
I have a project idea:
Web app that will automatically generate random like-a-facebook project ideas that will handle the buisness side and automatically post that offer on multiple forums, linkedin and send email with it. All using AI, Nural Networks, Big Data and VR.
Seriously, once fucking more some african or indian guy messages me to work for his awesome "its like a facebook but different" idea where he needs "just backend, frontend and mobile apps" and that he will just "handle the rest" and that "have no money now but after I sign a NDA he will give me some shares", I am gonna find him and shit on his head. Monday did not even ended yet and I already read 9 "offers" like this on my mail and facebook, only one guy white, rest indians or africans.
Why are then people suprised that we consider black and indian devs as a fucking joke 90% of the time. I have a indian dev friend and he could not find a dev job for 2 months, because everyone would rather work with less skilled asian / white guy than indian / black guy. This is not about racism, but about those retards that are acting like idiots. Hope I did not offend anyone (unless you do shit like this, then, please just smash your keyboard over your head).
Words like AI and neural networks are used just to lure the investors to our gofundme campain and steal their money after 2 years of silence.1 -
Wait, how did I only just find out you can use the space bar on a mobile to move the cursor?
https://cnet.com/google-amp/news/...4 -
devrant.io a site designed for developers and aimed at a platform they don't use for rants.
The desktop website is a quick bodge of a job, but they spent allot of time on the mobile app instead...
I would of thought that devs would prefer to write their messages on keyboard since it is second nature to most.
Correct me if I am wrong, but has no one else thought about this? I mean the web app is literally just a letter box view so that the format is the same as mobile...3 -
I'm a mac AND a PC! Are you? I actually quite like both of them.
My dev setup has both operating systems, with a shared mouse and keyboard (using Synergy) -> and I love it! It feels like I get the ability to do anything. There are some apps I prefer on the WIndows side and others that are fine on the mac. I use git and dropbox to share dev files between the two seamlessly.
I come from a Linux background, so I like that I can use bash on the mac, although on the PC I use Powershell mostly. I also have used the Ubuntu linux subsystem on the PC very effectively.
I was originally forced into the situation due to iPhone mobile development - now I don't mind at all!
On the mobile side I happily switch between iOS and Android all the time.
Love the way so many technologies exist to let you work across platforms so well.
Anyone else use both at the same time?10 -
What keyboard do you use/recommend for use with Termux on Android? I use Hacker's Keyboard but the layout it's ugly.6
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Automatically copying screenshots to clipboard has never been a good idea to begin with.
The screenshot feature since Windows 8, the full-page screenshot feature from the Firefox developer tools, and many smartphones automatically copy screenshots to the clipboard, which usurps the existing content of the clipboard If there is a clipboard manager (like on Samsung smartphones since at least the early 2010s), it usurps existing entries since clipboard managers only hold a limited number of entries. On Samsung's keyboard, that's twenty.
Thankfully, some other tools like gnome-screenshot for Linux make it optional. There is a "copy to clipboard" button on the file naming dialogue, but it does not happen unsolicitedly. This is the user-friendly way to do it.
Most websites and mobile applications do not support pasting screenshots from the clipboard anyway, only attaching them as file through a file picker or drag-and-drop gesture, making it pointless to copy screenshots to the clipboard. If I want to send a screenshot, I will attach it as a file.7 -
Finally made the time to chase my passion for game development. Tried with UE4 in the past but didn't have the time to evolve. Heard that Unity is easier for mobile game development so, Unity, here we go! My journey starts with an Android game project. I'm equipped with a book (of guidance) and a keyboard/mouse (of fantasy and adventure). Wish me luck!
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I had an idea for an open source project, but wanted to get some feedback before I committed a lot of time and energy to it. Seeing as how devRant is the only social media type app I use, I thought this would be a good place to ask.
The project would be an open source keyboard for iOS that would make it easier for devs to write code on their mobile devices. There's already a few "developer" keyboards, but they're either paid apps, or haven't been updated in a while.
Creating a custom keyboard isn't very complex, so it could be a good place for newer devs to actually contribute code and get comfortable with open source in general.
So my question is, do people use third party keyboards? Is this something people would be interested in contributing to? Should I go back to the drawing board?3 -
Mobile UI's where continuing the form relies on clicking the "submit" button on the popup keyboard can go get fucked, if I hit back the keyboard disappears, so now what?!?!?!?!?! Always show a fucking BUTTON2
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I love devRant, but one thing that I don't like is that all improvements are only coming to the mobile apps, and you can only become devRant++ using a mobile app. This is kinda discriminating against all of us who for various reasons cannot or will not use mobile apps. I am a dev; I use computers with big displays , (preferrably fullsize) keyboard and mouse. I do own a smartphone (a *real* one, with buttons, not a despicable touchscreen), but I use it for SMS/MMS and phone calls only. Mobile apps are just useless to me. The screen is too small and the numeric keypad doesn't lend itself for typing anything but brief texts. A bigger mobile phone wouldn't be a mobile phone. If it doesn't fit into the pocket and cannot be comfortably held against the ear, I might just as well carry around a laptop and then we're back where this rant started. I am a dev and love computers. Sure, I can develop for mobile phones too if needed, I'm just not the end-user.18
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Tried ranting about Javascript on my mobile keyboard. Typing an exclimation mark automatically put it at the end of the last word regardless of how many times I erased it. Wtf.... Did you just assume my context?1
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...cant wait for a better js mobile browser API for doin everything that wont work today....
for example, show and hide the keyboard when i like or completely getting rid of the adressbar without manifest.😎 -
Emulating a mobile browser in desktop Chrome does not show any virtual keyboard even when tapping into an input field. Same error in Firefox (and same in Vivaldi).
I thought there had been an emulated soft keyboard in the past, or was that only in Opera mobile emulator?
Is there any browser that runs on Linux that still does a proper mobile emulation?8