I am using Silver/Fire since the beginning of 2017 and I would like to share some thoughts with the staff and other users.
My employer suggested me Silver and I accepted to try it after reading the native post. Writing code in Swift and running it native in Android and iOS looks like magic, the IDE is crazy fast, and I have access to new platform vendor features from day-1. I appreciate the great evolution that the RemObject world did in the last few years, and I believe that they will have something to say for quite a while.
Remobject toolchain is very flexible and can be used in several (maybe too many) ways. I am trying two strategies:
create a solution in Silver with projects for iOS and Android
develop iOS app in XCode, and use Silver for Android porting
However, there are some major issue for me and my co-worker to actually shift to Silver:
Android/Cooper autocomplete is far too much buggy: often doesn’t work at all. Moreover, it is not clear to me when the resource elements (inside R) are updated. I would expect that they are updated at each build, but this does not seem to be the case.
Android Studio integration: it is an amazing feature and a killer feature to me, but to be really effective should be still improved. I would like to have the chance to work with resources completely in Android Studio, it means the possibility to create new xml files there and have them in Silver, and more stability in the connection between the two IDEs (after a while the link goes down and I have to restart Studio)
Debugger: quite often hangs on application start, and the device log view without any filter option is hard to use.
As last thing, I would really appreciate to have more templates for Android, in particular for application: now there is only a very basic template that has to be quite manipulated to be usable (create styles, etc.). If there was a chance, I could even create and share it with other Silver users.
As you can see, it seems that they are fixable problems, I hope they will be solved in the next versions!
thanx for the kind words and the great feedback. much appreciated!
R issues aside (more on that below), i would like to work with you to narrow these down and get them addressed. Can you give me specifics? is CC wrong or does t not show at all? it it consistently broken in particular scenarios, or is it inconsistent?
The R file is getting updated on each build; CC metadata for it should reload whenever the file changes on disk. I’d like to narrow this down more, i’ll add a few log messages to the R processing for today’s upcoming beta to see what’s going on. Does it never update for you, or just too late?
good idea! i’m not sure how feasible this is, but i’ll log an issue (the sync is not my area of code, so i’m not sure right now how the change detection works and if it can be made to pick up new files w/o causing problems).
I’ll need you help narrowing this down, as it’s not a known issue. I’ll add some logging to this part, as well.
is this with ADS run in for not? i’m not sure of thats a Windows-only issue but i herald some reports that having ADS running takes over ADBs debug connection and prevents the debugger form attaching in VS — i’m not sure if the same issue could apply on Mac as well. If that’s not it, we’ll need to investigate more., how does it “hang”? anything in logcat when it does, or any output in the build/ or debug console in Fire, at all?
Yeah, i should add a filtering option there. will log.
I’d love of you could provide me a skeleton project for the template(s) you’d like to see. i can then clean em and convert them to a template, and then have them translated to the other three languages, as well.