21–30 of 40 posts
I'm more than pleased with how Android looks and behaves on the Nexus One. Obviously it can only get better from here, but I really hope that Google tries to avoid going the exact same route of Apple with their iOS. Apple has a lot of desirable features on the iPhone, but also many quirks that I can never, ever get over. On top of this, I'm not a huge fan of how they're doing multi-tasking, and the introduction of "w…
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UI redesign will most certainly take place on the homescreen, the launcher, the dialer, etc. In other words: in it's own seperate applications, this wouldn't conflict somewhere because it's done quite frequently. Android is themeable quite nicely, so even changing the standard dialogs from one style to another _should_ work. My own concern here is that some developers probably have written their own UI code and some…
UI is about how things work first, about styling second. Themes are not going to help you with the former.
Someone needs to tell the Android Team that User Experience isn't a feature. It is fundamental design decisions early on that determine what the user experience is. That's like arguing a poorly designed home will function better after a fresh coat of paint.
Honestly, the UI on Android is not fundamentally bad. I really only see patchwork to improve the weak parts:
1) More responsiveness/smoother scrolling (hardware/low-level software issues).
2) Better text selection, copy/paste (perhaps iPhone-like - or some other solution).
3) Improved default apps. (market, calendar, camera especially come to mind as being sub-par to the iPhone).
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Yeah, I'm not mad at Google, I'm disappointed with HTC, Motorola and Samsung.
You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck? I'd like to see some stronger innovation, but that some subset of the choices suck just provides a solid reason to pick the better option. Even a bad example is an example, in that we all learn what doesn't work, and we can cherry pick the best things from a number of different sources. The wider ecosystem…
That's good. Problem: what about Sense and Motoblur? Think HTC and Moto are going to drop them just because the Android UI bas improved? yeah right...
Agreed: why would they drop them now, unless they were just startlingly worse? They aren't interested in Android's success outside of their devices, they want to differentiate themselves.
And this is terrible for Android as a platform, in my opinion worse than the issue of hardware fragmentation and maybe even worse than the handsets left in the dust re. OS updates, because it means UI knowledge becomes non-portable from one Android handset to the next, which is horrible.
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Yeah, I'm not mad at Google, I'm disappointed with HTC, Motorola and Samsung.
You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck? I'd like to see some stronger innovation, but that some subset of the choices suck just provides a solid reason to pick the better option. Even a bad example is an example, in that we all learn what doesn't work, and we can cherry pick the best things from a number of different sources. The wider ecosystem…
I'm guessing #2, and they don't merge their (hypothetical) improvements upstream to improve the whole platform.
I'm more than pleased with how Android looks and behaves on the Nexus One. Obviously it can only get better from here, but I really hope that Google tries to avoid going the exact same route of Apple with their iOS. Apple has a lot of desirable features on the iPhone, but also many quirks that I can never, ever get over. On top of this, I'm not a huge fan of how they're doing multi-tasking, and the introduction of "w…
I think there's some confusion over how Apple is implementing multitasking. Apps continue to run in the background, and when you re-open them you'll be back to where you were. The operating system will begin to terminate the apps when it is low on resources. In addition, there are certain services that work a little bit differently, like VoIP, music in the background, tasks that need extra time to run, etc. As far as…
No they don't, that's the point. The first multitasking you talk about is basically app hibernation, it gets a CPU priority of 0 (no CPU at all but stays in memory), the rest are OS services the application subscribes to, and then the OS manages the rest.
Apart from Task Completion (maybe) the application never runs. With some services (location, background streaming/music, local notifications) a callback may run (on a timer or all the time), but not the whole application, far from it.
> As far as I'm aware, this is very similar to the way that Android implements it.
Nope, the UI part is handled the same way (by freezing it on switch) but in android there are no OS services, instead a backgrounding application works as a server daemon (faceless) and the UI is a client communicating with the daemon. Faceless daemons don't get frozen, because you can't "switch off" from them.
Very exciting to see the major strides they're making. Unfortunately not all the updates are getting rolled out to all users, which makes it harder to get people "selling" the phone to their friends. I've got a G1 Dev phone and I'm still stuck on 1.5-1.6 (or something similarly ancient), so I guess I'm really hoping I can somehow swing an upgrade to a Nexus for myself :/
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You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck? I'd like to see some stronger innovation, but that some subset of the choices suck just provides a solid reason to pick the better option. Even a bad example is an example, in that we all learn what doesn't work, and we can cherry pick the best things from a number of different sources. The wider ecosystem…
> You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck? I'm guessing #2, and they don't merge their (hypothetical) improvements upstream to improve the whole platform.
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> You're disappointed because HTC, Motorola and Samsung provide choice, or because the choices they provide suck? I'm guessing #2, and they don't merge their (hypothetical) improvements upstream to improve the whole platform.
Why would they merge their improvements upstream. That would only lead to them losing their (hypothetical) competitive advantage. Handset manufacturers don't care about the android platform they care about their own implementation of the android platform. The battle isn't iPhone vs. Android, it's Apple vs HTC vs Motorola vs Samsung vs SE vs LG vs Nokia vs... Samsung is just as (un)likely to help HTC or LG as they are…
And that, in essence, is probably the biggest issue I see with Android in its fight against the iPhone.
It's even worse than Mac vs PC as at least Windows (at a given revision) looked and behaved pretty much the same on every machine. The theming was light (especially early on, when there was no support for it) and manufacturers added crap, but didn't replace whole subsystems just because.
I also find that to be an incredibly stupid strategy (but in prisoner's dilemma terms considering all the player are bastards...): the first worry of the players in the mobile phone space should be to drive Apple out of it as fast and as soon as possible, avoid their repeat of the iPod and their conquest of a majority marketshare.
Therefore the long term strategy should be to collaborate and make the common platform as good as possible as soon as possible (on all aspects) in order to push Apple out of the market, using hardware to differentiate themselves, and when Apple is stuck into a small minority box (or entirely driven out) they can go back to bickering among themselves and releasing custom shells and stuff.