Thursday, November 11, 2010

Review: DroidDraw

I'm going to be doing a quick review of a program I stumbled upon to help with Android dev to-day.  It's called DroidDraw and is a free standalone program that provides a little formatting guidance for your layout/main.xml needs.  I'm going to be messing around with how I do these so bear with me.

For those who want to try it out, there is a web-based version on their website.  My review is for the standalone program.

Link: http://www.droiddraw.org/

The Breakdown

Performance
Score 7/10

Overall, the program is lightweight and responds in a timely fashion to input, when it decides to respond. Unfortunately, some of the things you think, and sometimes know, it should be doing aren't exactly what it does. It also has this curious way of emptying properties (specifically the ones regarding colour) and returning them to default.
Ease of Use
Score 5/10

The GUI is nothing to write home about, but it's self-explanatory enough that the lack of refinement can be easily forgiven. Everything is separated into tabs, buttons are clearly labelled, all of the menus are properly grouped. There is a nice drag-and-drop widget functionality, but when trying to get something into a layout you've put down, all bets are off. Also of note, putting things in a RelativeLayout is really best refine by hand. I'd like to see things tidied up a bit, especially in the widgets tab, and the WebView is one thing I noticed was missing entirely. There's also a good bit of functionality missing when loading in resources, barring drawables.

Error Handling
Score 8/10


I didn't give it a perfect score, even though I didn't have anything outright error on me and the program didn't crash at any point. The reason for this is that I have a gut feeling there's a lot of Exceptions being thrown that aren't necessarily being announced. That, or they have buttons that don't do anything. The sizing catches in the properties also have this funny habit of telling you integers must end in px if you don't enter in a proper format string, even if you didn't write any numbers.

Documentation
Score 8/10


This is where things get interesting. On the DroidDraw website, there are some tutorials, which are linked to from the program's help menu. With the exception of the 3rd party tutorial, they are very well done and offer some insight as to why DroidDraw is a little uninspiring visually. The screencaps used in the tutorials are from a Mac, and boy are they flash. I'm a little jealous! That note aside, they do have a rather nice list of views that they support with screencaps of how they appear when used. Their 'About' choice is nothing but their logo and their support information is in a tab rather than in the menu, but it's relatively good. Another nod toward straightforward design too.

Efficacy
Score 5/10

This score I find highly subjective. For the purposes of my use, it did pretty well. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong by hand, what was stopping things from compiling, and how to go about fixing all of that. I wasn't looking for it to do more than that. I wanted a guideline and a reference and it gave me that. For someone who wants to use it to do a full design? Probably not a good choice. I have to note again that it doesn't have an exhaustive list of options, so there is a good bit of previous knowledge required if you want something that isn't included. You're on your own for those.

Value for Money
Score 8/10

I naturally didn't pay for it, so maybe it should be a 10/10 score, but I do feel that it isn't quite a refined product, so I have to bump it down a little on principal. For a freeware, it's serviceable enough, so I have to be satisfied.

Overall
Score 7/10

I did a lot of complaining, but really, the program did what I needed. It's better used as a reference for those still new to how layout/main.xml is set up or who are getting errors loading things in and can't figure out what they're doing wrong. Did it spit out a perfectly usable layout/main.xml? Not by a long shot. I had to do a lot of editing by hand once I got it into Eclipse again. It has potential, and I would love to see it in the next update. If you do end up using this program, see if you can't throw some bug/error reports their way. Once I have time, I will be going back over it and doing so myself.

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