How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video]

Re:How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video] by clumsysmurf on Monday June 06, 2016 @01:14PM (#11848376)

I think Android could have been much better if these principles were taken to heart during the design of the main APIs. From what I recall Josh collaborated with the Android team at some point; sadly too little too late.

IMHO almost every Android API i use violates some principle in this presentation.

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Re:How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video] by antiviral on Monday June 06, 2016 @05:42PM (#11850649)

My response (in good humor of course): https://cdn.meme.am/instances/500x/45999359.jpg

More seriously, every sufficiently complex, real-life design I have ever seen has been a set of compromises to best meet a set of competing constraints. The most that I hope that a book or a lecture can do is provide a general set of principles that an engineer should consider, and be mindful of they are going to violate them. I can't think of any very complex platform that hasn't run into this issue, and Android is no different, and probably fares better than most. Do you have any examples that you would prefer instead?

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Re:How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video] by chubot on Monday June 06, 2016 @06:08PM (#11850838)

Uh, isn't the obvious comparison iOS?

I think the difference is that Apple had decades of institutional GUI expertise. Android engineers were more like hardware/OS guys as far as I can tell, and perhaps less experienced with the abstractions conducive to easily creating nice GUIs.

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Re:How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video] by rqebmm on Monday June 06, 2016 @06:48PM (#11851115)

iOS and the Cocoa framework also have their fair share of hard to work with APIs. Like the OP said, you're always going to have to make compromises between conflicting requirements.

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Re:How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video] by pjmlp on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:24PM (#11849006)

So far I have spent more time on the NDK side than on the Java side, but for me the worst parts are the way Renderscript is bolted into the platform, all those m* member variables and anonymous classes everywhere.

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Re:How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters (2007) [video] by miguelrochefort on Monday June 06, 2016 @04:34PM (#11850101)

Android indeed has some of the worst APIs. They feel extremely inconsistent.

iOS and Windows APIs are so much better.

I think it's fair to assume that most people share the same experience.

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