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Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

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Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#21

Post by batiudrami »

joezydeco wrote: post #14
mmuro wrote: post #10

Fragmentation is a real thing, not laziness. Almost 98% of Android users don't run KitKat.

And then you read about stuff like this[1]: "Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software . For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture…

That's the original Galaxy S, a device which is now 5 years old. There are plenty of apps which no longer support iPhones that old.

"It's too hard" or "it doesn't make enough money" are more than reasonable. A software limitation in a 5 year old device is not.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#23

Post by eropple »

tomasien wrote: post #13
jaydz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give Android Studio a shot. Makes laying out the UI in XML a breeze with its excellent intellisense.

I've heard that, and that's fine - I appreciate the suggestion and will probably use it, but if that's actually the best then people will take Android dev more seriously when the best is the standard IDE. Right now Eclipse is the default and it blows.

Eclipse is the default for most Java development, but I know fairly few serious Java developers who use it. Some do, I'm not saying they don't exist, but IntelliJ--of which Android Studio is a fork--is generally the go-to tool amongst the experienced, skilled Java folks I know. Double for Scala. (I used nothing but IDEA for Android work at my last job, for about eighteen months - Eclipse is certainly not required and doesn't really make it easier.)

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#24

Post by georgemcbay »

taspeotis wrote: post #16

Granted I'm a developer who's just starting out with Android, but for the life of me I can't figure out any reasonable way to position things with percentages and maximum widths. I tried weight_sum and weight and gravity=center and that gets me percentages but then maxWidth is ignored. Most of the advice online seems to be "you must construct additional LinearLayouts".

I've been writing Android code for close to 3 years now and I can tell you the problem isn't you. Android layouts are like CSS in that eventually they warp your brain to the point where you can mostly understand them and be productive with them, but they are still kind of ridiculous and make doing things that should be relatively easy much harder than they ought to be.

Sadly the whole way the layout system works seeps into the programmatic APIs in all sorts of bad ways too -- like, I just want to set the width of this view... there's no setWidth, wtf? Oh... LayoutParams? What in the hell is all this. Not to mention things like every layout type having its own LayoutParams class and all the fun that comes along with changing say a RelativeLayout to a LinearLayout and then having to both change all your different dpi xml files to match (especially on tablet/phone hybrid apps), and also make a ton of code changes to correct your Java casting, etc. bleh.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#25

Post by DiabloD3 »

badman_ting wrote: post #22

Elephant in the room = adoption rate of current OS version. "Kit Kat is awesome!!" That's great. Who is using it?

I am. On my Nexus 5. Compared to a iPhone 5s, this runs circles around it. I'm not trying to start a flamewar or anything, but why are iOS devices so slow and clunky, and why is the UI so... fruity? Its just weird.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#26

Post by badman_ting »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #25
badman_ting wrote: post #22

Elephant in the room = adoption rate of current OS version. "Kit Kat is awesome!!" That's great. Who is using it?

I am. On my Nexus 5. Compared to a iPhone 5s, this runs circles around it. I'm not trying to start a flamewar or anything, but why are iOS devices so slow and clunky, and why is the UI so... fruity? Its just weird.

Terrific.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#27

Post by tadfisher »

taspeotis wrote: post #16

Granted I'm a developer who's just starting out with Android, but for the life of me I can't figure out any reasonable way to position things with percentages and maximum widths. I tried weight_sum and weight and gravity=center and that gets me percentages but then maxWidth is ignored. Most of the advice online seems to be "you must construct additional LinearLayouts".

And this is where a seasoned developer is required to implement good design on Android: you'll want to write a custom ViewGroup to layout child views the way that you want, without nesting layouts and causing overdraw or slow rendering.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#28

Post by pugz »

tomasien wrote: post #15
sigsergv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say the same for XCode — it's insanely horrible and completely unusable.

I suppose to each their own, but if anything except for the provisioning/plist stuff in Xcode is complicated to you, you must be used to something else because in and of itself xCode is phenomenal.

xCode (sic) is far from phenomenal. I have been writing iOS apps since 2008 and Mac apps longer than that and Xcode has made significant progress, but is still mediocre.

It's very telling that Jetbrains managed to pull AppCode out of nowhere and blitz Xcode. I had never before used an IntelliJ-based IDE, but within a week or two my productive increased severalfold. It really puts Apple's efforts to shame.

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#29

Post by philliphaydon »

tadfisher wrote: post #27
taspeotis wrote: post #16

Granted I'm a developer who's just starting out with Android, but for the life of me I can't figure out any reasonable way to position things with percentages and maximum widths. I tried weight_sum and weight and gravity=center and that gets me percentages but then maxWidth is ignored. Most of the advice online seems to be "you must construct additional LinearLayouts".

And this is where a seasoned developer is required to implement good design on Android: you'll want to write a custom ViewGroup to layout child views the way that you want, without nesting layouts and causing overdraw or slow rendering.

I tried to do Android development and threw in the towel.

But picked it up again later using Xamarin Studio. Much nicer experience and easier to make a nice design.

I managed to make a small app and have it run on my iPhone and Windows Phone, and my flatmates Android.

Lots of fun, just lacking ideas to make a real world app now :(

Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?

#30

Post by donniezazen »

my3681 wrote: post #4

I develop apps for both major mobile platforms, and when I speak with designers and artists about Android and iOS, they overwhelmingly prefer iOS. Since they use iOS devices themselves, it is their go to platform. It is almost always the one they want to work with. Oddly, when I ask them why, the answers are mostly qualitative. It has nothing to do with "reaching the most people" or "getting exposure". It's a simple…

Glad you said that. Apple prepositioned itself as a design oriented company something that designers associate with. Something being easy is highly subjective.
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