Well, it’s done. Crema has been submitted and now I’m just waiting for Apple to give the go/no-go. Hopefully I’ve got it right.

But whilst I’m waiting I’ve been looking at Android development as work want me to do some soon. I started with downloading the sdks and installing into Eclipse. I then read some web sites, created some hellow world projects and generally played around as I normally do when starting with a new technology.

So far I’d have to say I’ve been disappointed. The simulators are un-believeable s…l..o…w! so slow in fact, that I’ve actually killed them several times thinking they were hung. Now the work machine is no slouch. 8 Cores and 8G. It’s got more than enough horse power. Yet the simulators just grind, often consuming 100% on a core doing nothing.

Then there is the eclipse plugins. Primitive would be the most charitable I can really be at this time. The UI designer is nothing more than a flimsy facade to an xml file and simply doesn’t work. I ended up having to delete the xml several times due to the UI plugin failing to write it correctly. The rest of the plugins are not really much better.

I thought I might have missed something so I checked with the Android expert, he said they didn’t use the UI designer and built the whole thing using Ant !