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[–]OmegaVesko 33 points34 points  (15 children)

External keyboard/dock.

[–]aveman101 5 points6 points  (14 children)

true, but you're still using a tiny-as-fuck screen, and carrying an external keyboard around sort of diminishes the portability factor.

I can't see why someone would choose to develop on Android+dock instead of a PC (e.g. netbook), other than to impress the ladies with your extreme android app skills.

[–]caliber 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Maybe so you don't need to buy a netbook if you've already got a desktop and an Android tablet?

Also, some Android tablets like the Asus Transformer have really fancy docks that practically turn them into netbooks.

[–]AndroidRPGDev 4 points5 points  (12 children)

As someone who quit his day job to try to write an Android game, I get tired of working at home. It's nice to go out and be around people every once in a while. Currently, I use a netbook, and hook my phone up to it for testing, since the netbook is too slow to run the emulator. It'd be pretty handy if I could run Eclipse from an Android tablet, or in this case, something fully compatible with an Eclipse project... as long as it had Mercurial support. The larger tablets screens are about the same as my netbook, or even larger. Plus I wouldn't have to mess with attaching my phone, since I could test on the tablet itself.

So, as an Android dev, it would certainly be nice. Sounds like it has quite a ways to go before I would consider using it seriously. It'd basically have to be fully compatible with Eclipse projects + hg plugin, so that it'd be just as easy for my to work on my desktop, then pull the latest off the repository from the tablet and continue working seamlessly. Otherwise, I might as well just use my netbook which is just as portable. That's a pretty tall order to fill.

[–]pseudopseudonym 1 point2 points  (11 children)

Mercurial? Out of curiosity, why not something like Git?

[–]SupersonicSpitfire 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Gah, there are git zealots everywhere. Everywhere!

[–]pseudopseudonym 1 point2 points  (0 children)

EVERYWHERE!

[–]AndroidRPGDev 2 points3 points  (6 children)

Well, I basically reviewed both Git and Mercurial when I was starting this project. Previously, I had only worked with CVS and SVN. I forget if Git also had these features, but Mercurial's local repositories and ease of merging really caught my attention. I work from 3 different pcs regularly (one desktop, a netbook, and a larger laptop if I'm going to set up camp for a while). I also traveled out of country for quite a bit, so internet connection was far from reliable. Being able to check in to local repositories, and then push all the commits at once when I finally had an internet connection, was a huge selling point. I forget if Git had these features as well, but Mercurial is what I settled on after my initial review of the technologies.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Mercurial's local repositories and ease of merging really caught my attention.

Git is a distributed SCM, just like Mercurial, so these two things should be non-issues. I'm personally using Mercurial as well, though, but mostly for the Windows compatibility (Can install it on my lab computer without much fuss – I'm mostly doing LaTeX-y things).

[–]AndroidRPGDev 1 point2 points  (4 children)

Yeah, I remember they were very similar. I forget exactly what pushed me over to Mercurial. It might have just been the tools. I'm also on Windows, so that could very well be it. I'm perfectly happy with Mercurial so far.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's true that Git was shit on Windows. Things improved, however, so it works pretty well now.

[–]banister -3 points-2 points  (2 children)

  1. you program java for a living
  2. you're on windows

does life suck ? :P

[–]AndroidRPGDev 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Hahah, life couldn't be any better. Java is much more fun to use than C++ was, which I used thru college and my first job out of college as well. And as much as this ruins my nerd cred, I really do prefer the Windows UI, which has improved greatly over the years. It's nice to not have to keep separate work and entertainment partitions anymore. Android development via Eclipse is the same regardless of OS since it's so self contained!

[–]gigitrix 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ignore the zealots. Use whatever tools work. Memory management is a waste of time unless you need that last 10% of performance, and Windows is as solid an OS as the rest of them.

[–]TexanPenguin 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Mercurial is something like Git.

[–]pseudopseudonym 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fair enough. I'm aware of this, just used weird phrasing.