[dead]
Android 16 is here
201–210 of 360 posts
Re: Android 16 is here
#202The release of Apple's new glass design has made Material Expressive appear aesthetically pleasing. Apple has declined so much, it's unfortunate.
Maybe Apple thought they need to make a desperate move to deflect from their lack of AI?
Re: Android 16 is here
#203The release of Apple's new glass design has made Material Expressive appear aesthetically pleasing. Apple has declined so much, it's unfortunate.
The first developer-only beta release?
Re: Android 16 is here
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I tried a few Android cheap phones recently IMO that's the big 'problem' with Android - any fly by night company can make a phone with it, which sours those people on Android as a whole and rightfully so. They may not understand that it's not Android itself that is awful, but the low spec'd phone or 'enhancements' some company added. Higher end Android phones generally don't have any of these problems at all. I can…
It's a problem that 95% of the world can afford to purchase a smartphone with a modern OS?
Disgusting. The EU asap needs to pass some law or something to force the monopolists to fix that.
Re: Android 16 is here
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is this reaction never sticks. Everyone's up in arms, but would you really want to go back to Android KitKat or iOS 2? Probably not for more than novelty, right?
[flagged]
> Bad faith argument.
Citation needed, and you're violating the HN guidelines besides.
> Assume good faith.
Re: Android 16 is here
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The new iOS demo kinda makes me feel excited to try the new update, once they iron out a few of the poor contrast spots.
Bland and inoffensive is what I want from my OS. The stage manager should be facilitating the show, not trying out their own material on the crowd.
The OS is less the stage manager, and more the venue itself. Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
Re: Android 16 is here
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.)
With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things:
1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.)
2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality."
And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people.
This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.)
I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
Re: Android 16 is here
#208Oh great, I get to learn how to use my phone all over again. We need a "leave this the $EXPLETIVE alone" setting for our user interfaces.
It is good for your brain, it is an excellent exercise. /s
Unironically think a lot of HN users brains have hardened up after using the same shitty linux DE from the 90s for too long, to the point a slightly changed border radius or color leaves them unable to function.
Re: Android 16 is here
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bland and inoffensive is what I want from my OS. The stage manager should be facilitating the show, not trying out their own material on the crowd.
The OS is less the stage manager, and more the venue itself. Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
Opera house is an app. Sydney is the OS; that needs taste, not majesty.
Re: Android 16 is here
#210The worst part is I’m so deep in Apple ecosystem that it’s impossible to move to Android.