Probably Java or .NET (C#) depending on your access to development tools. Java in Eclipse is pleasant and free, and so is MS Visual Studio -- but it's not cheap.

That's what I was leaning towards. Android apps are written in Java, correct?

I have this great idea, two actually. An app that makes fart noises, and an app that uses the Phones flash as a flashlight ;)

Yep, Android Dev Kit is Java. There are a couple unifying tools that allow Java (?) or some other languages to be ported to several devices (RIM, Android, iPhone, WMob, etc.), but those are on the fringe.

Regarding the flashlight, on most phones, this is a phone-specific action, and the best apps often come from the phone mfgr. My Droid Incredible couldn't run the MotoDroid DroidLight app, but with the Android 2.2 update, VZW introduced an HTC flashlight that has three levels of brightness using the flash LEDs -- man is it ever handy.

I was kidding. I think the app store is about 95% flashlights.

<whoosh>

:o

Hey, it's worth noting that HTC's flashlight app is awesome.

Can someone tell me in layman's terms why the Safari browser is so slow to load and Firefox/IE is fast? I'm talking web pages. I've left it at default preferences.

Takes me 5-10 minutes sometimes to load, say, cnn.com, and that's if I'm paying attention and retrying all the time. On other wireless machines nearby it takes a second or two (Vista). Google sometimes takes a minute.

I think the wireless signal is less than optimal, although the mac thinks it's full strength. The Windows machines think it's 2-3 bars.

If all sites are loading slow it may be a network issue and not Safari. Compare the DNS settings on the machines and see if the slow one is different. I use Google's DNS servers at home because the default ones from my FIOS are slow for some reason.

I'm betting it's a software issue. Even Mac's can get cluttered up...

The Express edition of VS is pretty cheap... free in fact. http://www.microsoft.com/express/

because safari sucks.

Do they use the same algorithm that they used for the iPhone?

http://www.wirelessweek.com/News/201...-Apple-iPhone/

Is the NIC running in half-duplex mode?

Can you try another browser on the slow machine? It might just be that box in general...

correct
incorrect.

If you're going to stick with the JVM, at least choose a language with better support for FP and less abuse of the ; key. Scala and Clojure are both fairly popular, and Groovy has some nice bits to it as well.

My vote would be for Python or Ruby

When was the last time *anything* was in half-duplex mode?

When? The time I saw a production web server running really slowly then realized that was the cause.

It was about four years ago though...

CDR, try downloading the nightly builds of webkit. I have found them to be much faster than the standard safari.

Meh. I'm the same guy who races on 32h wheels. That's pleasant too. They're tools: I don't care how shiny they are. I'd argue that Java will be much easier to learn just from the community support than something like Clojure. Like I said, I love learning new languages, but I'd think that learning the foundational languages first has some value.

Either way though, it really doesn't make much difference what language someone uses. Very small detail to being a programmer.

I completely agree. When it comes to enjoying what you're doing however, it makes a big difference.

Can any of you guys recommend a web monitoring tool, one that tracks what an end user does on the internet and can report back? One of my clients wants to watch his employees. I looked at work examiner, seems to have a bunch of bells and whistles but all I need is web monitoring. Many moons ago we used webtrends at work, other then that I haven't used anything.

I've always been more into the problem domain than the language, but I agree that a really bad language is going to stink the place up.

Funny language story. I was reviewing someone's code a few weeks ago, in VB6. VB still supports a bunch of the old anachronistic BASIC language features, like line numbers.

I noticed an arbitrary "4:" on one of the lines and I asked him why it was there.

He replied, "I don't know, but it doesn't seem to hurt anything".

I literally facepalmed.

Do any of us work for your client?;)

I hate hardware languages (verilog). So much so that I'm actually debating changing majors from EE to Management.

I don't know how you guys do it.

Everyone says java is easy to pick up, but I had the opposite experience.

I still don't understand how arrays work.

I have a really weird one.

Many years ago (mid-1970's) I was working for an engineering firm in Chicago doing some heat transfer calcs. They had access to a computer somewhere and I would dial in on an acoustic coupler modem. I thought that my code was correct (in some bastard language called "super" fortran), but it kept crashing. I put in all kinds of diagnostics (print out values of this and that, etc.) and when I did the code ran perfectly. I took them all out and it crashed.

Then I started taking out the diagnostic lines of code one by one. I could take them all out but one. If I took that line out the program crashed, but if I left it in the code ran just fine. It was a real head scratcher. Finally I replaced that line with a CONTINUE statement. And the code ran perfectly.

To this day have don't know for sure what was going on. But I was never fully confident of anything that came out of that computer after that.