Life of Coding

Why I prefer AppCode over Xcode

2015-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

For the past four months, I've been learning iOS development. Basically I just read a book, and then started writing code. I haven't started Swift language yet, for most iOS open-source libraries are written in Objective-C. And I think I won't start using Swift in another one or two years.

As an Android developer, I am used to Android Studio, which is a fantastic IDE for coding. For those Android developers who havn't using Android Studioyet, I strongly recommend you try it.

When I started using Xcode for iOS development, I am very confused.

What is wrong with Xcode

I accidentally close projects all the time.

cmd + w is a common shortcut for close a tab or window on OSX. If you're using Safari or Chrome, you know what I mean. If there are more than one tab in your brower when you use cmd + w, it close the focused tab. If there is no tab left, it close the window. It's quite easy to understand, right? But NOOOO, Xcode doesn't behave like that. If you use cmd + w, it close the whole project.

Delete a whole line? NO!

You can't use cmd + delete to delete a whole line, which is also a common shortcut on OSX. Yes, you can delete a whole line of code using cmd + delete, but if there is just an extra line and you wanna to delete it? cmd + delete will delete the line and delete half the line above it.

Code completion sucks

If you wanna use a certain method in a NSObject, which has a word index in it, but you can't remenber the whole name of the method, what will you do? Look up the document or source code to get the exact name or the first letter of the method? Because Xcode can only auto-complete code from the beginning. For example, if you type in [Object index, the IDE won't tell you all the methods related to index keyword, it can only tell you the methods started with index. This really makes writing code slower.

NO Auto-import

Why not? Even Eclipse has this feature a long long time ago. I can't stand that when I am writing a method/function, the IDE tells me:" Oh, I can't recognize this. Oh, you can't use that".

Can you really see the Log?

The font and line spacing of the Log console is a disaster. The text is bold and line spacing is way too small. So the log just looks like a black block. I can't really distinguish one log from another.

CocoaPods

CocoaPods is a dependency manager for iOS development, like gradle or maven for Android and Java. To use CocoaPods in your project, you can follow the steps on the CocoaPods website. This is not convenient enough! Becuase you need to use the terminal, which Xcode do not provide a shortcut to open and relocate to the project folder. You will have to open a terminal, then go to the project folder, or go to the project folder in finder and open a terminal there. Finally you need to run a command line to install the dependencies. Why all the trouble? AppCode can do all that for you, all you need to do is editing the Podfile.

AppCode is better

AppCode fixes all the complaints I have about Xcode, plus I can use all the keymap I am already familiar with in Android Studio. Just export the keymap settings in Android Studio and import it in AppCode.

You can find out many other better feature of AppCode on the official website. I am sure there are a lot to explore. You can find some tricks and tips on the AppCode Blog. This IDE truely makes my life a lot easier.

Flaws in AppCode

AppCode is not perfect, though. When it comes to edit xib or storyboard file, it is crappy. And AppCode sure cannot submit apps to the AppStore. It's also not that good when editing the project settings.

Now my workflow of a new project is this:

Create new project using Xcode
Config CocoaPods in AppCode
Edit xib and storyboard in Xcode
Write Objective-C code in AppCode
Config project in Xcode
Submit to beta test or AppStore in Xcode

Because AppCode can sync code and files instantly with Xcode, you don't need to worry about conflicts when editing the same project/file using two IDEs.

Others

I don't mean starting an argument about which IDE is better. It's just, to me, Xcode is not good enough. I can be more efficient and focused when using AppCode, that's what really matters.

If you are always an Xcode user, you can try a 30-day trial of AppCode, I mean, it doesn't hurt, does it? If you don't like, leave it there, delete it, do whatever you want with it. But if you like it, you will find out it really is an productivity tool. After all, IDE should make coder efficiency, right?

Change Android studio Logcat text color to Eclipse style

2015-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Android studio is better than Eclipse with ADT in almost every way. I've been using it for almost a year now. However, Logcat is an exception. Only Assert, Error and Warn log level's text has different color, which makes it very dificult to distinguish between Info, Debug and Verbose log level. And I believe these three log levels are mostly common used by app developers (including me of course).

Locate Logcat Settings

Open Android Studio preferences (press cmd + , if on OSX), you can find Android Logcat settings in

Editor ==> Colors & Fonts ==> Android Logcat

Click Save As... button to save the current scheme, name it.

Uncheck the Use inherited attributes checkbox, in order to change the text style.

Find Eclipse Logcat style

You can find the Eclipse Logcat color setting in the follow foottrace in preferences:

Android ==> LogCat ==> Colors

In case you have already deleted Eclipse or didn't bother to open it, here is the RGB color of each log levels:

Verbose:  000000
Debug: 00007F
Info: 027F00
Warn: FF7F00
Error: FF0000
Assert: FF0000

Others

I use the Android studio default Assert color to make it different from Error log level.

I use the Android studio default theme, not Darcular, so the Eclipse logcat style works for me. If you are using the dark Darcular theme, there is already a good color set for it.

Finnaly, here is the colorful logcat:

Execute JavaScript in Android without WebView

2015-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

For some reason, I need to execute JavaScript code in an Android project. Because the JavaScript code was running in a background thread(in doInBackground part in an AsyncTask), I don't want to use WebView.

Why not WebView

First of all, WebView is heavy. WebView is slow, especially in a large/huge project. Plus, you need to add a lot of WebView related settings to just execute one code snippet. It's just simply not worth it.

Secondly, WebView is UI related. A WebView should be created in UI thread. Sure, you can create it in UI thread, load JavaScript code in a background thread, then pass the result back to UI thread. It's workable, but it's not safe.

If you call methods on WebView from any thread other than your app's UI thread, it can cause unexpected results. [source]

Last but not least, WebView is fragmented. After Android 4.4(API level 19), Android is using WebView baseed on Chromuim. Although this is toally a good thing, the WebView in Android 4.3 and below suffers the old version. You should code two version of WebView related code to just make it work. A lot of code should be re-write according to this article.

Luckily, the good people in Mozilla make a project called Rhino. It is typically embedded into Java applications to provide scripting to end users.

How to use Rhino

Rhino is a open source project, you can get the source code using this command:

git clone https://github.com/mozilla/rhino.git

Or fork their project on GitHub.

Of course, you don't have to get the source code. If you want to use it in your Android project. Download Rhino first, unzip it, put the js.jar file under libs folder. It is very small, so you don't need to worry your apk file will be ridiculously large because of this one external jar.

Here is some simple code to execute JavaScript code.

Object[] params = new Object[] { "javaScriptParam" };

// Every Rhino VM begins with the enter()
// This Context is not Android's Context
Context rhino = Context.enter();

// Turn off optimization to make Rhino Android compatible
rhino.setOptimizationLevel(-1);
try {
    Scriptable scope = rhino.initStandardObjects();

    // Note the forth argument is 1, which means the JavaScript source has
    // been compressed to only one line using something like YUI
    rhino.evaluateString(scope, javaScriptCode, "JavaScript", 1, null);

    // Get the functionName defined in JavaScriptCode
    Object obj = scope.get(functionNameInJavaScriptCode, scope);

    if (obj instanceof Function) {
        Function jsFunction = (Function) obj;

        // Call the function with params
        Object jsResult = jsFunction.call(rhino, scope, scope, params);
        // Parse the jsResult object to a String
        String result = Context.toString(jsResult);
    }
} finally {
    Context.exit();
}

As you can see, it is quite easy. You can dig up more in Rhino document.

Proguard & Obfuscation

You can set up Rhino's proguard setting by adding this following line into your proguard-android.txt file.

-keep class org.mozilla.javascript.** { *; }

When you run the assembleRelease task, with minifyEnabled true of course, you still can see a lot of warning like these:

Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class javax.swing.JMenu
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class javax.swing.JMenu
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class javax.swing.JMenu
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class javax.swing.ButtonGroup
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class javax.swing.JScrollPane
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class java.awt.event.ActionEvent
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole: can't find referenced class java.awt.event.ActionEvent
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole$1: can't find referenced class javax.swing.filechooser.FileFilter
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole$2: can't find referenced class java.awt.event.WindowAdapter
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole$2: can't find referenced class java.awt.event.WindowEvent
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.JSConsole$2: can't find referenced class java.awt.event.WindowEvent
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.xml.impl.xmlbeans.LogicalEquality: can't find referenced class org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlCursor
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.xml.impl.xmlbeans.LogicalEquality: can't find referenced class org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlCursor
Warning: org.mozilla.javascript.xml.impl.xmlbeans.LogicalEquality: can't find referenced class org.apache.xmlbeans.XmlCursor

Luckily, evan with these warnings, the app runs fine. You can ignore them(that's what I do), or adding this line inot your proguard-android.txt file.

-dontwarn org.mozilla.javascript.**

How to increase Android Studio memory limit in Mac

2015-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

The technical doc of configuring Android Studio on the Android Tools Project site is out dated. So you can not increase memory limit by configuring the studio.vmoptions file under ~/Library/Preferences/AndroidStudio/ folder. Actually, in my case, there is no studio.vmoptions or idea.properties file like the doc said.

Locate the configuration file

If you are using Terminal, run command

open -e /Applications/Android\ Studio.app/Contents/bin/studio.vmoptions

Or, you can also open Applications folder in Finder, press ctrl then click or just right-click on Android Studio, choose Show Package Contents, you can find studio.vmoptions file under Contents/bin folder.

Config your settings

You can just edit your studio.vmoptions file, increasing your Xms and Xmx.

Xmx specifies the maximum memory allocation pool for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), while Xms specifies the initial memory allocation pool. Your JVM will be started with Xms amount of memory and will be able to use a maximum of Xmx amount of memory.

This is my configuration:

-Xms128m
-Xmx4096m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=200m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Once you make the changes, don't forget to RESTART Android Studio.

Other

If you want to fall back to default values, here it is:

-Xms128m
-Xmx750m
-XX:MaxPermSize=350m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=96m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

Or you can download it from the Android Tools Project Site.

I think increasing the memory limit in IntelliJ IDEA is the same, I didn't check it though.