Car analogy: what if your steering wheel was in a different location of your car every couple of weeks? :)
Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
141–150 of 326 posts
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#142Argh, 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…
I like the new keyboard. I feel like my typing mistakes have been reduced. Earlier i felt like i need to be precise on clicking the buttons now without boundary i don't need to.
I like everything about the new UI except for that Gmail profile switching. But you can easily switch from menu so no problem. Now OS X Yosemite those changes are annoying me and also slowing down my macbook pro. I had to disable few settings to get a acceptable performance.
Edit: There is one particular annoying thing in L. Sometimes when click on a tab like in Chrome, the notification window gets the touch and is semi shown.
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> why is removing the key separators a good idea? // I've a suggestion for this one - key separators support a paradigm of key presses , following the [traditional] keyboard metaphor. However with swipe-able keyboards it doesn't really make sense, you only need to approximate the position of the letter during your swipe - no "barriers" helps to enforce that new paradigm. If most people swipe, then it makes sense to m…
> If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board).
reply
Do most people swipe? I honestly have no idea, and I'm not an Android user. I'm wondering if there are any stats on that. Particularly for older or less techno-phile users, swiping keyboards might be difficult to get into using.
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#144"There are a bunch of new ‘transitions’ between elements. I don’t know what the battery cost actually is for this, but as a user I just don’t care about cute transitions between elements. I want fast interaction with my mobile device." This is poorly phrased at best. Transitions exist to make it obvious what is happening: e.g. you minimize a window and it zooms into the taskbar/dock, as a visual reminder that it's no…
Yep, as someone who doesn't have Lollipop yet, there's almost nothing I can actually take out of this article. It's too vague and general.
For what it's worth, my girlfriend -- decidedly not a tech person -- got the Lollipop update for her Nexus 5 a few days ago. I asked her how she liked it, and she said she could barely even tell what had changed. I don't think the HN demographic is even remotely representative of how most people will feel about the Lollipop changes.
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#145The problem is that software companies acquire the amount of labor (which is large) that they need to create something but then don't have anything to do with that extra labor when it's finished and all that's needed is maintenance and a reasonable amount of additional upgrade work. So if the company is profitable enough that it doesn't need to lay anyone off, it has the excess labor keep iterating on a product that'…
Exactly, it's mostly busywork.
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
> swipe up on your phone, not left or right
The way you wrote this makes it seem like swiping up instead of left or right is really horrible and confusing. Why? Previous versions of Android had a totally different lock screen design, so I honestly do not know why you feel so confident that the correct swiping direction should be left or right. Because Apple did it that way?
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#147I find the new Google Maps UI to be frustrating. The number of taps to just find directions to something after you search for it seems to be increased, for no good reason. I think it's mainly because there are multiple paths through the app to do the same thing, and some of them are optimized flows and others are not. So tapping the search bar is not the most efficient way to get directions anymore... you should tap…
I agree. I've been traveling into London for the past couple of days and I always feel annoyed just navigating through Google Maps
Citymapper is fantastic in London
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#148I find the new Google Maps UI to be frustrating. The number of taps to just find directions to something after you search for it seems to be increased, for no good reason. I think it's mainly because there are multiple paths through the app to do the same thing, and some of them are optimized flows and others are not. So tapping the search bar is not the most efficient way to get directions anymore... you should tap…
It's ever so slowly getting better. I remember when it first launched I couldn't even do waypoints.
Planning a cross-country trip for Thanksgiving right now. In classic I can type "Town A to Town B to Town C to Town D" and it returns a route between A, B, C and D. In the new interface it brings up a list of restaurants in Town A. How can the king of search get this wrong?
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#149The problem is that software companies acquire the amount of labor (which is large) that they need to create something but then don't have anything to do with that extra labor when it's finished and all that's needed is maintenance and a reasonable amount of additional upgrade work. So if the company is profitable enough that it doesn't need to lay anyone off, it has the excess labor keep iterating on a product that'…
That sounds right.
In this case I would like them to put this people to work on my pet annoyances: screen turning on while on my pocket and natively recording my conversations.
Screen shouldn't turn on under any circumstance, unless I press the physical button. There's no way to configure this and there are many cases of this behaviour: incoming call, low battery...
There is no way to properly record every conversation. There are apps, but they don't really work. Some of them with "good critics" demand to host the audio in their servers. Are people crazy?
I've recently bought one android phone for my mother. Her experience has been sad and painful (in her words). Now it seems her next phone will need just another painful period.
It's not just geeks, UI is difficult and changing it is no good.
Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
#150What are there, 1B Android users? I'm sure Google would like that to be 7B. I'd wager the complaints of the sort of people who frequent lobste.rs or HN are not representative of the majority of current users and almost certainly not of the next 6B potential users. Overall, it's everything Google said they would do with material [1]. It's fine to dislike these things, I don't necessarily like them myself, but claiming…
> Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.
Yeah, whenever I see sentence like "as a user, I don't care about animations" I just stop reading the rest. I appreciate the fact that you, the article/comment writer, have good mental model about what is going on and you want to be as fast as possible, but that comment also shows that you aren't a typical user and you don't have a clue how common people thinks.