Will Android 4 still redraw everything when rotating the phone instead of animating?
This is not only a bad experience for users but also is one of the most difficult parts when developing Android apps.
How about some Android graphics true facts?
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#52Hardware rendered vs software rendered??? :/ It's all just software. The only thing that matters is how fast it is.
Downmodders: Can you explain why? My point is, software is rendering the graphics. Either it's software running on one chip, or it's software on another chip. That's irrelevant. What matters, is how fast the graphics are rendered.
Maybe you, as a consumer, only care about how fast something is. This post is more geared towards people who actually care about how things work, or, more pertinently, to the people who have been spreading misinformation around. So it isn't a post about Android's being slow or fast as much as a post about its internals.
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'll just go out and say that it's a non-issue for mainstream user." Might also be why the "mainstream" is primarily using Apple iPads/iPods/iPhones vs the myriad of Android devices available. What bothers people is that when you swipe from screen 1 to screen 2, there can be a > .5 second delay. It doesn't feel remotely "natural" for something that you're physically touching and supposedly interacting with.
>Might also be why the "mainstream" is primarily using Apple iPads/iPods/iPhones vs the myriad of Android devices available. Which mainstream? Last time I looked Android market share was substantially higher than iOS.
Look again, because iOS has greater market share than Android does. But it's a moot point anyways, because one OS is limited to a few devices that sell at high price points and the other is used by tens of manufacturers and hit low, medium, and high price points. Actually, because of that, it makes iOS's market share even more impressive.
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a definitional thing. "Works" at (say) Microsoft or Google means "produces a correct result at the end" whereas it means something quite different at Apple. The most egregious example I've seen of this is the way Mac OS filtered mouse movement data from the beginning, but it still doesn't feel right on Windows (and wasn't even in the ballpark until around Windows 98/NT4). (And, by contrast, the Amiga had pretty…
You say that as if that was a fact but in reality is nothing but your opinion. I can barely stand the, in my opinion, horrible mouse acceleration in OS X and knowing apple I can imagine that they feel that giving me the option to disable it isn't user friendly.
Yes, the Mac acceleration is horrible. The best solution I've found is to buy a Microsoft mouse and install the Microsoft driver for it. Works properly, just like Windows.
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple makes compromises, too. On the original iPad scrolling can be really laggy (probably only after installing a couple of apps, so you won't notice it in the store). Meanwhile, the current generation of dual core Android phones have hardly any lag issues anymore.
Somewhat agreed. It can be laggy, but on mine it rarely is (but it does happen). However, it's never consistently choppy when scrolling. So... laggy sometimes, but still smooth scrolling. Every Android device I've tried (just tried a couple tablets at a Best Buy this week) have been consistently laggy (response times to swipes) and choppy scrolling.
Actually the first time I used an iPad I was blown away by the smoothness of scrolling in web pages, and it still holds up really well today IMO
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#56Those are some nice technical details and it’s right to correct them when someone gets them wrong. They ultimately, however, don’t matter†. If scrolling on one device makes me want to throw the device at the wall while on another device I don’t even notice that I’m scrolling, then that’s a problem. I’m looking forward to trying out an Android 4.0 device to see whether I still want to throw it at the wall. That’s the…
I've had the chance to enjoy dual-core android phones (Atrix, 2.2) & tablets (Xoom, 3.1). The difference compared to single-cores is gigantic, everything is super smooth, on the level of the iPhone/iPad as far as responsiveness goes for apps and home screen. I have to say that if the goal is to have a superb OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception: Android's Webview unf…
I have also played with and had dual core android phones and the scrolling experience is nothing like iOS by any means. One of Steve Jobs skills is that he had an innate feel for good scrolling well beyond the feel of the average person. It might feel the same to you. You might be perfectly happy with an android. Still, android has a challenge to make the OS feel as snappy on a wider range of CPUs and platforms than iOS and the lack of of consistency, even on dual core machines is like night and day.
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#57From the article: There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1024x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and s…
I thought you raised an interesting point and posted your comment over there. Romain Guy answered : 99% of the drawing operations performed by the UI involve alpha blending. We have optimizations of our own to limit overdraw (for instance layers generate meshes to avoid blending completely transparent fragments). So there's overdraw, just not as much h nS
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#58So, in summary, "We have hardware acceleration, have had it for a long time, but it isn't the reason android interfaces are almost universally clunky. We actually have no idea why that is." I don't use any apple products but I get tired of Google touting how much better 4.0 is when most people are locked into phones running 2.2 or 2.3 for years into the future.
A lot of the 2011 phones should be updated to Android 4.0, and the ones who bought them in 2010 will upgrade next year to Android 4.0 phones.
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
It blows my mind that people can't understand that scrolling "feels right" is a show-stopper feature for a touch interface. Meanwhile, at Apple, they would have got it right in version 0.1, and Steve Jobs would treated that as prototype quality and made the team do 10 better variations.
Apple makes compromises, too. On the original iPad scrolling can be really laggy (probably only after installing a couple of apps, so you won't notice it in the store). Meanwhile, the current generation of dual core Android phones have hardly any lag issues anymore.
Garbage collection in Android is another performance bottleneck. ICS "fixes" this by allowing the garbage collector to run on a different thread but imo that's
a kludge.
Re: How about some Android graphics true facts?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I'll just go out and say that it's a non-issue for mainstream user." Might also be why the "mainstream" is primarily using Apple iPads/iPods/iPhones vs the myriad of Android devices available. What bothers people is that when you swipe from screen 1 to screen 2, there can be a > .5 second delay. It doesn't feel remotely "natural" for something that you're physically touching and supposedly interacting with.
>Might also be why the "mainstream" is primarily using Apple iPads/iPods/iPhones I don't believe the reason for that is UI responsiveness (also, I don't agree with your 'primarily' assessment, but let's not chew on that). In my opinion, the differences are so small that UI performance just isn't an issue. There are other areas where iDevices are noticeably better compared to every competing device. >What bothers peop…
For me, the UI performance is the single biggest reason why I don't use Android as my primary phone. No matter how fast the underlying action is, the jumpiness and occasional lagginess makes it feel slow to me.
It frustrates me - there's so much I like about the OS that so many good things can be erased by leaving the visible perception of being slow.