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Android Design

developer.android.com

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Re: Android Design

#91

Post by veeti »

mdwrigh2 wrote: post #86
joshsharp wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Very frustrating for "building blocks" to show things like "scrollable tabs" that I'd quite like to use, where in fact no such standard implementation seems to exist! It's all well and good to display UI best practices, but give us the actual widgets you're talking about, otherwise the whole thing is pointless.

Are you talking about a ViewPager? http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/08/horizontal-vi...

The ViewPager doesn't include any sort of tab bar. You have to integrate them with tabs yourself or use a 3rd party library like ViewPagerIndicator.

Re: Android Design

#92

Post by veeti »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #68
jc4p wrote: post #7

As an Android developer for many years I was excited when I read the blog post about the site. When I went to the site, I was very disappointed. I've spent the better part of 10 minutes on the site so far and haven't seen anything other than marketing text and screenshots of what my phone looks like. How do I make these "beautiful designs" work across all Android phones? How do I use an Actionbar on a non 3.0+ device…

The announcement for and docs of the Action Bar specifically point to libraries that can be imported pre-3.0 to provide the Action Bar.

You mean the ActionBarCompat example which is so minimal that only the simplest apps can use it? It's lacking almost every feature of the action bar.

Re: Android Design

#94

Post by resnamen »

emehrkay wrote: post #15

I like the date picker http://developer.android.com/design/building-blocks/pickers....

I despise it. One of my Gmail labels is set to sync content for 365 days. I nearly got RSI spinning that damn thing with my thumb until it hit 365.

Re: Android Design

#95

Post by nl »

gcb wrote: post #81
nl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no. Config settings like that are a way for lazy designers to avoid making hard decisions. Joel Spolsky wrote about this over 10 years ago: Every time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision. That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have t…

i love those reasoning of 'real' designers to enforce what THEY think is best. like the 'designers' of gnome3 (using the term loosely here) who thinks focus-follow-mouse and click-does-not-raise-window are things that only the devil would use and so no one should be allowed 'for usability sake' and 'think of the children' think about it. a black wallpaper is the best readability option. period. so let's remove the us…

Did you read the link? He specifically addresses a subset of your issues:

This doesn't mean eliminate all choice. There are enough choices that users will have to make anyway: the way their document will look, the way their web site will behave, or anything else that is integral to the work that the user is doing. In these areas, go crazy: it's great to give people choices: by all means, the more the merrier. And there's another category of choice that people like: the ability to change the visual look of things, without really changing the behavior. Everybody loves WinAmp skins; everybody sets their desktop background to a picture. Since the choice affects the visual look without affecting the way anything functions, and since users are completely free to ignore the choice and get their work done anyway, this is a good use of options.

(Note this part: everybody sets their desktop background to a picture)

Re: Android Design

#97

Post by alex_c »

rwc wrote: post #64

I know some will criticize this is ticky-tacky, but it's one small thing that, when added with a lot of other little details, make Android feel like it's still designed by engineers. They've "touched nearly every pixel" and "App icons are works of art in their own right" but the contact name on their contacts icon is "Lorem Ipsum". Not exactly a warm, human feel. http://developer.android.com/design/static/content/des…

"Lorem Ipsum" is more of a designer thing.

Re: Android Design

#98

Post by kizza »

Interesting how they make sure to say that you shouldn't use bottom tabs like in iOS. For my project I decided to do exactly that instead of using an Android standard action bar, because:

1:The bottom bar fits 5 items. An action bar needs to have the app name as well, which means it can't have 5 items anymore. Having a "More" option is just dumb.

2:The iOS bottom bar has text underneath its icons and the action bar doesn't. I'm afraid the icons I have aren't obvious enough without text.

3:This is a conversion from iOS so the images are already made

4:Getting an Android action bar to work on older versions is very difficult. The Android compatibility library doesn't help here, and the third party libraries I looked at were not mature enough. I'm doing this work as part of a fixed price contract so I can't waste days getting it to work reliably.

Bottom line: Android apps would look a lot better if doing things the right way was also the easiest way.

Re: Android Design

#99

Post by there »

pax wrote: post #58

Why did choose to put 2 phones on the homepage? Because one phone has 3, the other 4 buttons? Isn't that still a bit redundant. (If it where not for a design-centric page it wouldn't have troubled me)

because part of that site talks about compatibility with different devices.

the phone on the left is a nexus s, which has the (now) older style of dedicated hardware buttons. the nexus prime on the right is apparently what newer devices are supposed to have, which are software buttons that are actually just part of the main lcd and the operating system reserves a section of the screen to draw them in software.

the big benefits of the newer style are that they can be hidden while playing movies or in other situations where they are not needed, they can be rotated when the device is rotated, and, maybe most importantly, the operating system now gets to control which buttons are there and in what order they're in. an annoying thing about the hundreds of different android phones prior to this was that every manufacturer seemed to put the 3 or 4 hardware buttons in a random order that made them inconsistent.

Re: Android Design

#100

Post by thetrendycyborg »

feralchimp wrote: post #82

I'm going to assume the internet has already somehow collectively dealt with the fact that the Android name for a drop-down list control is a "Spinner."

it doesn't always drop down. Sometimes it "drops" up, like if the element is at the bottom of the phone. You can "spin" through options. Makes sense.
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