So I’ve splashed out the 600euro and got me a SIM free Samsung Galaxy S4 Android phone.

Why?

Well I find myself doing more and more JAVA these days (as if I wasn’t busy enough keeping up to speed on .NET and iOS too) and I’ll admit it’s starting to win a place in my heart, not the language as such as it’s IMO inferior to C#, but the framework has lots little gems, there are some pretty nice external frameworks e.g. Drools, JBPM etc, and the application servers are interesting (I'm focusing mainly on JBoss AS7 these days); what I’m trying to say is that I’m starting to feel that Android may be a home away from home.

Flirtations

Well I’ve previously two timed my iPhone with a Windows Phone 7, this lasted for about 10 months before I moved back to iPhone, I guess one of the biggest reasons for doing this was I’d invested in a few iOS apps like the very expensive TomTom Worldwide and I kept finding a need for it (I travel with work and don’t always have roaming data). Also the lack of apps was disappointing, even though I contributed to the ecosystem with a WP7 app for Grass Management. I know the app situation is improving especially with Microsoft buying them up but I see too many complaints on social feeds to make me think they are a little shaky (is it the fault of the developers? … maybe!). When I moved back from WP7 to iPhone I complained for a few days over little nuisances, but I stayed there. Until now….

Android a week on

I’ll admit I was a little apprehensive at first thinking I’d like only the big screen and the  ability to write and deploy some droid apps on a real device (i don’t include the Samsung Galaxy Y that’s lying about the office as a real device :-) )

The good

But I’ve been very surprised, the Android apps appear to be better, the experience appears to be better, notifications are better. Why do i think this is? well maybe because the API allows the developers to do more, iOS does really lock things down which has it merits (we’ve all heard about the apps that silently call premium numbers).

• The screen is large and beautiful
• Camera is fantastic
• Have all the apps I had on iPhone (not yet paid for TomTom again but will)

The bad

• I don’t have the ability to have widgets on the lock screen when I have a PIN active.
• The screen is too large! Contradiction I know, but I’ve hands like shovels and I need two of them for this device, apple has a great argument but it won’t win out.

Am I going back

Well never say never, but apple needs to up it’s game with a bigger screen, I always thought it was fine until I look back on my iPhone now and think it’s tiny

Overview

I’ve been looking at a c++ application that uses ACE library, now I’ve never used this library myself, I used to love BOOST when I was 100% c++ (way back in the day sniff sniff). C++ 11 has drastically improved life sure but it’s not got everything I need.

I decided to do a bit of googling to see what I’ll be dealing with and below was the first post I came across on StackOverflow…. oh dear! not a great start for my motivation :-(

Post

Do yourself a favor and steer clear of ACE. It's a horrible, horrible library that should never have been written, if you ask me. I've worked (or rather HAD to work with it) for 3 years and I tell you it's a poorly designed, poorly documented, poorly implemented piece of junk using archaic C++ and built on completely brain-dead design decisions ... calling ACE "C with classes" is actually doing it a favor. If you look into the internal implementations of some of its constructs you'll often have a hard time suppressing your gag reflex. Also, I can't stress the "poor documentation" aspect enough. Usually, ACE's notion of documenting a function consists of simply printing the function's signature. As to the meaning of its arguments, its return value and its general behavior, well you're usually left to figure that out on your own. I'm sick and tired of having to guess which exceptions a function may throw, which return value denotes success, which arguments I have to pass to make the function do what I need it to do or whether a function / class is thread-safe or not.

Boost on the other hand, is simple to use, modern C++, extremely well documented, and it just WORKS! Boost is the way to go, down with ACE!