On 19/10/2015 08:31 AM, scott wrote:
> The best (IMO) would be to buy a cheap smartphone (or tablet) running
> Android. You can then download the free developer tools for your PC
> (google "Android SDK") and so long as you can code in Java you'll be
> away. If you have the phone/tablet connected to your PC (via USB cable)
> in the developer tools you can just click "Run on device" and it will
> compile, send to the device, and start it running on the device
> immediately.

But you can't run the SDK *on* the device itself?

So I'm not going to be sitting in the corner of Blenheim Palace writing 
a quick Java class or two. (Or rather, I can *write* then, just not 
*compile* and *execute* them...)

> What exactly is it you want to do? Smartphones/tablets are not good if
> you want the user to enter a lot of text, if you can somehow change the
> inputs to something more suited to a fat thumb on a small touchscreen
> then it will work better.

My sister got be a rather expensive digital recording system for my 
birthday. It's really cool, but the one thing it can't do is the one 
thing I was expecting it to do: overdub. It can be configured as a USB 
audio interface though, so from a PC it's trivial enough to open up 
Audacity or whatever and overdub to your heart's content.

Trouble is, the set of places where I'm allowed to make noise and the 
set of places where my PC is have an empty intersection. I can use my 
laptop, but it's big and heavy and requires mains power to operate.

A tablet is obviously much smaller. I have no idea whether any of them 
can act as a USB *host*, nor whether Andriod has drivers for something 
as exotic as a USB audio interface. I doubt you can run Audacity, but it 
can't be *that* hard to hack together a simple Java console program that 
starts or stops recording on a certain key-press...

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