121–130 of 163 posts
This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows. Flagged.
Now that I can see the examples, they are actually pretty decent.
I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc. I would think that web designers, and designers in general, would be happy with the flexibility to create their own thing rather than having something that pretty much looks like everything else. The web used to h…
* I'm bit surprised by all the comments about "Consistency". All of us use the web every single day and every single website looks completely different, all with their own styles, layouts, color schemes, etc* And every day hundreds of millions of people waste some of their time and intelligence making sense of said inconsistent designs. This is why Safari's reader and Readability are so popular.
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Have you installed any apps on your iOS device? Consistency is pretty hard to come by these days.
I find the iOS UI patterns to be consistent, but the "skins" on those UI elements tend to vary quite a bit. Now this is the case on the iPad, since I don't have an iPhone I cannot speak to that. Just getting a podcast program on android that had a consistent UI where things made sense was a fruitless effort. Streaming content is not consistent either, some apps stream really well (audio galaxy), while other stream te…
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snoggdoggl...
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Not true, actually. Google has released a compatibility library to allow developers to target old versions: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht... So older Android versions can use modern apps. Both the examples I gave (Foursquare, Spotify) work with both newer and older versions.
There are some pretty gaping holes in the compatibility library. Luckily the most important of these (ActionBar support) is covered by a great 3rd party library (ActionBarSherlock). If anything, I think the existence of the compatibility library and ABS show that Google is dropping the ball a bit on the core Android framework. Why even have these be extra (and in one case 3rd party) libraries? Where possible why not…
Flipboard set a standard for beautiful news applications. Path reimagined what social could be on mobile and made numerous UI innovations. Instagram took a novel concept and made photosharing exciting to a new audience. Square showed off the increasing real business viability by making payments accessible to anyone with a phone. All these apps weren't available on Android for some time. Sure they are now but this far more a matter of increasing market share than a change of opinions and it continues to hold true as we see well-designed apps like Paper start iOS only. Android is by no means the epicenter of creativity on mobile and though beautiful, the ports largely still have substandard experiences than their iOS counterparts.
In my opinion this is a result of equal parts hardware and audience. Android may be on more devices as a whole but many of the devices are not even remotely competitive with top-tier smartphones. They are sold with the intention of being budget friendly and thus it becomes a hassle to acquire the additional devices, adapt interfaces to the numerous screen sizes on them, and adjust for performance limitations. I also believe that the design of the iPhone naturally attracts great designers. Android has a reputation of throwing good hardware into poorly designed phones with cheap materials and inferior build quality - the future is just not as cool when you need to interact with plastic buttons. Lastly, I believe the iPhone audience is naturally more in tune to seek out great designed products. The openness that appeals to Android customers creates an expectation that applications should be free. There is a decreased interest in browsing the marketplace and many of the most popular apps are just free copycats of popular iPhone applications.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not true, actually. Google has released a compatibility library to allow developers to target old versions: http://developer.android.com/tools/extras/support-library.ht... So older Android versions can use modern apps. Both the examples I gave (Foursquare, Spotify) work with both newer and older versions.
There are some pretty gaping holes in the compatibility library. Luckily the most important of these (ActionBar support) is covered by a great 3rd party library (ActionBarSherlock). If anything, I think the existence of the compatibility library and ABS show that Google is dropping the ball a bit on the core Android framework. Why even have these be extra (and in one case 3rd party) libraries? Where possible why not…
This is a list of apps that in no way use the android default widgets. So yes, it can be beautiful when you do all the hard work yourself. (and yes, these apps look fantastic)
As others have noted, plenty of these apps are using the ActionBar (which is a default widget starting with 3.0, with an unofficial, open-source compatibility library) and plenty are using Fragments (also standard starting with 3.0, with an official compatibility library).
Moreover, many of these apps (e.g. Boid, Pocket, Papermill) are explicitly Holo-themed, so, at a minimum, they're using the default widgets for design guidance even when they're not using them directly (for compatibility or other reasons).