Comment by TuringNYC

Comment by TuringNYC a day ago

3 replies

On a somewhat related note, I feel any specialized device development should come hand-in-hand with a great developer experience with a well-designed simulator experience.

I was an original Google Glass developer (2013) and not allowing development via a simulator was one of their biggest mistakes ever. You had to continuously test squinting into the actual hardware. After about 25min it would overheat and you were forced into a cooldown period of about 30min. You couldnt easily put together tests or parallelize testing mundane parts of the app off-device. I ended up with the worst headaches after three months and we pivoted our business to something else soon after.

throwaway314155 20 hours ago

I mean if you couldn't stand using the device long enough to test it (not that you should have to - i agree on that), maybe the problem was that the device simply wasn't in anyone kind of ready state to be shipped as a revolutionary new way of interfacing with computers. Like christ, it would overheat after 25 minutes?

  • linkregister 18 hours ago

    Being one of the 3rd party developers to create apps for a nascent platform is a great position for your business to be in. It just so happened that Google Glass didn't work out. But imagine being an early developer for Android or iOS.

  • TuringNYC 3 hours ago

    >> I mean if you couldn't stand using the device long enough to test it (not that you should have to - i agree on that), maybe the problem was that the device simply wasn't in anyone kind of ready state to be shipped as a revolutionary new way of interfacing with computers. Like christ, it would overheat after 25 minutes?

    Well the usage for these types of devices (e.g., Apple Watch, Google Glass) is meant to be notifications driven and event driven. So the unit was sufficient for regular Production usage (though not great for all-day use.) However, development is basically a constant stream of tests, etc -- so the development experience is continuous and thus much more taxing than the Production user experience.