Xoom, Xoom, Xoom

Android really shines on a tablet. After playing with my new Xoom tablet and Android Honeycomb for a few hours now, I get the sense that Android was really meant for the larger screen. The notifications, the multitasking, the widgets; they all combine to make an incredibly powerful and rich tablet OS. Having a home screen with your calendar and email at your finger tips is incredibly more useful than page after page of icon matrixes.

And switching between applications is much nicer on Honeycomb.

To think that all this time Android has really been a tablet OS crammed into a smart phone just bursting to get free. By the same token, I can see now just how lame iOS is as a nice, but limited phone OS when running scaled up to a larger screen on the iPad.

And the Xoom hardware is very impressive. It is slightly taller but significantly narrower than the iPad and has much smaller bevels around the screen as well. Although this does make it harder to carry the Xoom without leaving finger tip smudges. The dual core Tegra2 processor makes everything feel pretty snappy as well.

The Xoom has a higher resolution packed into a slightly smaller screen which makes for higher DPI. Games like Angry Birds and eBooks look incredible on the Xoom's higher density screen.

Notice how the status bar at the bottom of the screen goes into a minimal mode when reading a book? The same thing happens when viewing a movie in order to minimize the distraction of that bottom strip. These are really nice touches that I would usually expect from Apple rather than Google.

Of course, I'm talking here in terms of environment only. With a few exceptions, as far as applications go, iPad wins hands down. No question. No contest.

As we have seen in the past, a superior OS usually doesn't win against an OS with more apps so this should be an interesting fight.

A Sweet Combination: JavaFX 2.0 EA, Griffon, and Groovy

Working with the recent early access release of JavaFX 2.0 has been interesting. On one hand, the scene graph API you know and love translates surprisingly well to Java. The team at Oracle has done a nice job of keeping the new API simple to use. The animation support still makes it easy to do the simple things, and possible to do the sophisticated. The memory overhead is down while performance is up. All good.

There are definitely places where JavaFX Script (now Visage) is missed. Binding, object literals, functional programming, and easy internationalization were all particularly useful language features. To make up for this loss, you can now use all of the old, familiar Java tools to write JavaFX including all of the awesome testing libraries and IDEs that Java is known for. In my opinion, this more than makes up for the loss of the awesomeness that was the JavaFX Script syntactic sugar.

You can always add some of that sweetness back in by using one of the many great JVM languages at our disposal. My weapon of choice happens to be Groovy and I can tell you that Groovy and JavaFX are a potent combination. Apparently Groovy is a terrific language for expressing application frameworks as it boasts two of the best in the Java world: Grails for web applications and Griffon for desktop applications.

Yesterday I decided to take a quick look at what would be involved in creating a JavaFX application plugin for Griffon. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was. Griffon's architecture is clean and the documentation was great. It took me a lot longer than it should have just because I was enjoying looking around under Griffon's hood.

A video showing the results of my little experiment is embedded below.

I plan to continue developing this plugin with the ultimate goal being first-class Griffon support for JavaFX applications when JavaFX 2.0 ships later this fall.

The JavaFX team at Oracle has a lot of work ahead of them. There are some missing features and some rough edges, but this Early Access release is a great start. I can't wait to see the finished product.