This was more complaining. I wish he would show an example with android UI
Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
71–80 of 144 posts
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#72Rather than asking "Why don't designers take Android seriously?" I'd ask "Why don't companies take Android seriously?" Once a company decides to take Android seriously, it isn't all that difficult to create compelling apps, with or without a designer that is dedicated to the Android platform. While I don't advocate simply copying the iOS experience on Android, a developer with some knowledge of how the platform works doesn't necessarily need a designer's help to modify the iOS experience to fit Android paradigms.
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#73One sentence answer:
Because it's a pain in the ass.
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#74I was able to successfully train a designer to use the Android SDK's tools when appropriate, and check in graphical assets. In preparatory meetings I insisted the designer be in the room with the coders and product managers as I explained how Android is different. I taught them all how to use conditional layouts and how to test apps for good practices by changing font sizes to see if they really are geometry-independ…
I'd be interested in reading more about this - I'd love to show it to some designers I work with.
At the moment, I'm struggling to get the designers to acknowledge that Android and iOS need to be designed seperately. iOS designs can look pixel-perfect due to having only 2 resolutions to care about (ok, iPhone 5+ have taller screens, but same width)
Android is a whole different story.
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is both a real thing and laziness. With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it, the support library will fallback gracefully down to all the OS versions you do care about. Most of the time when I hear designers complaining about Android fragmentation they are really just using "fragmentation" as a scapegoat to bemo…
So you're saying it's easier to design on iOS then.
It IS much easier. Given that you only have to worry about 2 devices, with 2 resolutions (2x scaling is handled pretty well), it's perfectly possible to make a pixelperfect layout off a PSD (of course, things get a bit complex with font sizes, etc, but autolayout helps out).
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#76Granted 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 seep…
I've been there. I even started one small isolated project with the experimental idea to completely forego the XML layouts and just build the entire thing in Java.
Embarrassingly, it actually worked out okay. The thing is, with XML layouts, eventually the functionality requirements force you to pull in nearly all the views in Java and set styles and behavior programmatically. It's not exactly pleasant to do everything in Java (especially things like RelativeLayout.LayoutParams), but you're going to have to do it anyway, so the only thing the XML layouts really save you is setting up the view hierarchy. Perhaps if I worked with a designer who created the XML layouts and styles, this wouldn't be the case, but the Android tools for designers seem laughably bad.
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I picked up CSS in a few hours but I still can't begin to wrap my head around how to properly work with Android layouts. I really wish Google would let people use HTML and CSS instead of that bizarre relational XML stuff.
WebView is your friend.
That can quickly turn into "now you have two problems."
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eclipse is also HORRIBLE. Horrible, horrible horrible. Objective-C isn't exactly easy to understand, but Xcode is. I could functionally make things work in Xcode in 2 days having no experience with C or Objective C, I've probably spent 6 weeks in Eclipse in my life and I still couldn't really tell you how to do things. I have to re-learn it every time I want to do something, especially with the UI.
Give Android Studio a shot. Makes laying out the UI in XML a breeze with its excellent intellisense.
It surely does. But why should I switch my build system? I'm a happy maven user. After all, only after AS came into picture I hear about the gradle non-sense. Gradle doesn't even use the proxy settings configured in AS (at least on Linux).
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#79I 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…
That's not really surprising, since a large portion of mobile developers probably became mobile developers specifically because of what Apple was doing in iOS.
Re: Why don’t designers take Android seriously?
#80Because great designed Android apps don't sell any better than mediocre ones.