Guest post by Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, “Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, …). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting.”
Please give me access to the whole Android API from C++.
Thanks you.
10$ is a bit much I find. Mr Lee’s GCC port is cheaper, yet less featured. I’d like to put some bucks into this application, but not THAT much (how long would I use it with no debugging facility ?)
Kochise
Depends on where you are in the world really, in the UK $10 will buy you about half a pizza from Dominos, so in that regard $10 is extremely cheap. For those in other parts of the world $10 will of course be a bit of a stretch.
I suppose though, if you can afford a decent Android tablet to run it, you can probably afford $10 for this software.
My experience of AIDE is that it is an extremely competent bit of software, it was very slow on my device, but that was a pretty crappy device anyway. I would imagine on a good modern Transformer or something, AIDE would be great fun and well worth the $10.
I’d pay 10 bucks if my Nexus 7 would be completely supported (high DPI, Tegra 3, nVidia GPU, integrated debugger and profiler, etc…) for in-situ coding.
Otherwise for a half-featured IDE, I’d pay 3 or 4$, max. Considering Eclipse, Android SDK/NDK, nVidia Tegra SDK, etc… are free and more featured.
We’re dealing with CPU running at 1 GHz min, 512 MB or 1 GB mem, GB of storage. I recall working on Borland’s TurboC / Turbo Debugger on 66 MHz 486’s with 16 MB of memory.
Just to point out the obvious. That’s why I’m pretty disappointed to notice such a drawback. What’s the next step, punch cards as high level language ?
Kochise
Sure, many IDE/SDKs are free, for many reasons, mostly that they are funded from places other than direct sales, i.e. all the ones you mention are. Eclipse by IBM, Google, and others.
The problem comes that when you don’t have a massive corporate sponsor, you either develop for the love of it, you stick in ads, or you get people to pay for it.
Developing for the love of it is great until the love goes away and you’re left with a chore. Ads are of course annoying, and you barely make any money unless you have huge volumes. Then what’s left is to charge for it, and $10 really is a tiny amount of money in first world nations.
It’s not because the price tag of 10$ is affordable in the first world that I’m gonna throw them into nothingness.
While I do approve that AIDE is a bit more polished than Mr Lee’s alternative, his is… well let me count… more than 6 times less expensive (1.50$ vs. 10$) for similar functionalities.
So unless AIDE provides really better usability, debuggability, etc… I’ll sadly refuse the offer, without denying its positive point nonetheless. That’s why I said 3-4$ would be a more fair bargain.
I spoke about TurboC/debugger that were fit for 386 era. We’re 15/20 years ahead and cannot offer similar performances/functionalities and that’s a shame. Google should address this issue because, especially tablets, nowadays, are ready to perform in-situ coding, by far.
Otherwise, what’s those CPU/GPU, high res screens, bluetooth keyboards for ?
Kochise
I agree 100% about Turbo C etc. Unfortunately for tablet fans though, whilst the technology is more than capable of anything we could do with a computer 10 years ago, there is more money/mindshare/”strategy” in the trivial apps and games, and not programming tools.
As attractive as many of these tablets are, whether we like it or not, they are artificially restricted in a way that our 386s (or Acorns, Amigas etc.) were not.
10 years ago companies worked on making their computers do as much as possible with the technology they had. Now they spend time removing and limiting capabilities.
“A bit more polished”
The two aren’t even comparable. I personally think $10 is a little much also but considering AIDE essentially has no competition I’m not surprised by the price.
It would be neat if Google made a full IDE and debugger for Android on Android. The lost productivity of using such a small screen without even being able to have more than one window open at a time limits developing on a tablet to not much more than a novelty. Google has far more important things they need to improve.
There is a new version of the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment? Adding C/C++ support….
Well that’s what I thought… anyone else tired of software all being called the same thing?
http://aide.sourceforge.net/
AIDE is not developed by Google: http://www.android-ide.com/about.html
I’m the linker, apology.
Fixed.
Thanks!
I thought AIDE was the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment.