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Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

lobste.rs

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Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#101

Post by PuffinBlue »

mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

Agreed. Some more venting...

Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events'.

This = install aCalendar[1] and Simple Calendar Widget [2]

Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app? I don't want a profile pic so I don't know which account is which of the 5 I need to use, so I just pick pot luck or swipe through them all? Then there is that annoying hover button. 'WRITE SOMETHING' it screams out at you, 'Surely that's why you're here isn't it? You couldn't possibly just want to scroll through your inbox without accidentally tapping me!!!'

This = install K9 mail.[3]

YouTube - Enter menu drawer, close it, press 'back' > still takes me back to the home screen. Take a leaf out of Feedly's book and open the frickin' menu drawer!

Chrome - Thankfully you can stop the annoying tab merge pretty easily.

Notifications - now to get to settings I have to do three actions, two pull downs and hit a teeny tiny little button, or you know, waste a space on the home screen.

Phone dialer - I actually like it. It's way faster to get to you contacts and has a much better layout than before. Still got that annoying floating button - 'DIAL SOME NUMBERS ASSHOLE!!!'

Default keyboard - why is removing the key separators a good idea? Is there some data to back that up? To me it looks like a cluttered mess. Thankfully switching back to the old style is just a setting away, but it would be great if there was a more sane default.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.withouthat...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.calen...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl...

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#102

Post by mattmanser »

ToastyMallows wrote: post #86
mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

> they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps To be fair you can turn this off, that's the first thing I did when Chrome notified me of this "awesome" change.

Can you? Oh, thank god! Actually, now doing that, that reminds me of another two WTFs?

The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing...

And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicator looks. It changes shape depending where your finger is pulling from, why? I keep thinking something's gone wrong because this uneven blob suddenly appears on the top of your screen.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#103

Post by brodney »

mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

I'm pretty pleased with lollipop. Some of your complaints may be down to personal choice, but not all. For example, the triangle animation changes from pointing left when the action would be 'back', to down when the action is 'down', as in hiding the keyboard.

Some other thoughts: - Getting to settings is no different from before when I had to swipe down and then tap a button to see the settings button. Now it's two swipes instead. - Try schedule view in calendar for the overview you're looking for. - The double tap on notifications to open them I like because it means I won't accidentally open one.

Things I've said 'oh, cool!' to: - Guest accounts - Brightness slider in the swipe down - Priority/None interruption settings for the ringer. I used to use Shush! but this works nicely and with more configuration options, albeit less granular timing. - Lock rotation in the swipe down settings - Flashlight in the swipe down settings

Just another data point.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#104

Post by e40 »

mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

I have a spare phone so I decided to throw lollipop on it. Wow, I couldn't believe how much I hated it, and I'm not one of those never-upgrade-it-because-I-don't-like-change folks.

On 4.4.4, I've been hating the new calendar. Christ I hate the colors in agenda mode. They make it almost impossible for me to "see" the text without extreme concentration.

The first time I became familiar with the constant-change-is-bad meme is with Quicken. They would force you to upgrade every 3 years (or so, I may have the number wrong), and for a while I upgraded every year. Nothing changed from year to year except everything was in a different place and they added more bugs. I finally moved to Moneydance a couple of years ago and have been in financial software heaven ever since. One of their selling points was "we don't change shit around for no reason!"

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#105

Post by [deleted] »

mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

[deleted]

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#107

Post by mattmanser »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #101
mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

Agreed. Some more venting... Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events…

You can actually reskin the keyboard back to the old look.

Click the unlock button, swipe up on your phone, not left or right, pull down on your phone twice, click the settings button, ignore the randomly flashing menu items as you scroll down, find "language and input", click "Google Keyboard" (not "Current Keyboard"), click "Appearance and Layouts", click "Theme", click "Holo White".

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#108

Post by Akujin »

They also completely removed the Gallery app and you are now forced to use Google Images. Unfortunately if you disabled the Google Plus app Google Images won't even turn on leaving you with no way to look at your own local pictures.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#109

Post by microtonal »

debacle wrote: post #63

We have a huge underutilization issue in tech right now. The strategy seems to be to throw programmers and designers at the wall until they make something that sticks, but a lot of bad decisions come out of that strategy and it's not immediately apparent that they're bad decisions until users complain. This has led to a lot of cyclical design cycles, reinventing the wheel, NIH, etc. It's going to be damning to the te…

We have a huge underutilization issue in tech right now. The strategy seems to be to throw programmers and designers at the wall until they make something that sticks, but a lot of bad decisions come out of that strategy and it's not immediately apparent that they're bad decisions until users complain.

And it apparently leads to shallow changes. While I am ok with the new design in OS X, there are a lot real problems that I would rather like to see addressed, such as: providing a better filesystem than HFS+, fixing the annoying 'sandbox apps set quarantine attribute' bug [1], making Mail work with GMail, make iWork on par with the old versions again, etc.

[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/162

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#110

Post by jpdus »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #70
mattmanser wrote: post #52

Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo! The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful. And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone…

>> "And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day." Try the 'agenda' view which does exactly that. I was also going to debunk most of your other complaints because I know they're false but I don't have my Lollipop device with my at the moment.

Well, the new calendar app is ridiculously bad. You can't get back the old "normal" calender view, lots of screen space is wasted in every window and the 1-month overview now is totally useless without any indicators.

Compared to that, the new Gmail and Maps apps are almost good...

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