Friday, January 3, 2014

Game: Badlands

For our first game review I will start with the game Badlands. If you don't know it, it's really addictive. The purpose of the game is get with the inhabitants of the world to the end of the level. But to get there there are all kind of traps and obstacles. Next to that there are power ups to get your clones bigger or smaller, stickers or jumpier, square or round.


The controls of this game are very simple. You touch the screen or you don't. That's it. Very simple. If you touch the screen all your clones will go up and if you let go they will go down. The simplicity of this is that everybody can play this game. All ages can enjoy it.


The graphics in this game look very cool and the music give a nice vibe to it. Login in with Google+ is possible to compare your scores (saved clones) against your friends. To bad Cloud Save is not implemented in the game. So you can't take your progress from your phone to your tablet or back.

Badlands can be downloaded in the Google Play Store for free.
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Android Studio versus Eclipse (with ADT plugin)

On the last Google I/O the Android develment team announced a new tool called Android Studio. It's a IDE based on IntelliJ. At this point we are not sure if it's going to replace Eclipse (with ADT plugin) as primary IDE for Android development or that it's going to be supported both in the future.

For the time being, Eclipse is the official supported IDE and Android Studio is only available as "Early Access Preview". This means that it's not officially supported yet and that it's only intended for people that want to take a peak on what's to come.

In the table below we show the main differences:

Eclipse (ADT)Android Studio
TypePluginComplete IDE
Build systemSomething internal in the pluginGradle
Same build as command lineNoYes
Continues compileYesNo
Officially supported by GoogleYesNo
App flavors possibleNoYes
Reproducible buildsNoYes (with Gradle)
StabilityNot really stable, but workable (mainly because of Eclipse)Very stable

At this time I prefer Android Studio. I always use it for personal projects. I don't think it's wise for companies to start using Android Studio. Google is releasing new version almost every week of Android Studio and the Android Gradle plugin. Better to wait for it to get more stable.

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