IBM's market ​capitalizat​ion surpasses Microsoft

Re: the Android emulator taking a long time to boot.

You're supposed to start it one single time then launch your builds in it WHILE it's running. Not restart it every time. So this is a moot point.

As far as message box style alerts for visual debug output, you can show them with the Toast class

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/Toast.html

public void MessageBox(String message){
    Toast.makeText(this,message,Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
}

If you need log4j type logging, there are open source projects that fill that

http://code.google.com/p/microlog4android/

I dunno if this is even worth saying but you have a real time debugger in Eclipse with the SDK in the Eclipse DDMS perspective

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/debugging/ddms.html

You can debug Android code visually the same as visual studio. All your log message tiers are separated into tabs and you can filter them in the debugging pane.

I didn't say I was starting it every time or restarting it for a new build. It still takes a long time (around 45 seconds) for the build to get onto the emulator and run. Regardless, 2 minutes to start any application is unacceptable, especially when there's no progress bar or any clear indication on what the emulator is doing. It's even more irritating when the build finally runs after waiting for 45 seconds and then crashes in the emulator with the most unhelpful error, forcing you to go back and run it again with breakpoints.

Yeah, I hear Android devs complaining about the emulator near constantly.  Basically you just don't use the emulator, and develop on the device instead.

Look at the Google fanboy defend the godawfully slow Android emulator. LOL

I've used the emulators for Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and even bada, and Android is by far the slowest. I have to admit the iOS emulator is the fastest with Windows Phone coming in second. Both the bada and Android emulators are way slower than either the iOS or Windows Phone emulators, and, coincidentally, they both use an Eclipse (or an Eclipse-derived) IDE. Gotta love that speedy JRE powering it!

Android and Windows Phone emulators are about equally slow for me. I guess it's worse with Android because it's less standardized and you're supposed to test on different resolutions etc.