51–60 of 163 posts
For anyone looking for a fully-featured notes app, Catch, mentioned in TFA, is the way to go. It does sync, has a web interface, and probably a 100 other features I haven't used.
If anybody has any questions feel free to email me at a@catch.com
The problem with the Android UI isn't (only) the lack of beauty, it's the lack of consistency, style and attention to detail. Things like included/used fonts (although the default iOS notes app also fails horribly here), placement of back buttons. And that's exactly one of the things that disturb me in the Android UI, things like the 'back' functionality, which is utterly confusing. In iOS the 'back' button is always…
I think this is more of a personal preference thing than something that is broken. I use an android phone, and used to use a honeycomb tablet. When i replaced the tablet with an iPad, the thing i hated most about iOS was the back button behaviour. In iOS back takes you back to wherever the application developer thinks back should take you. In Android, except for very rare cases, back takes you back to the previous screen you were on, which might be up one level like on iOS, or it might be a different app entirely. One isn't better than the other, they're just different functions.
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 have some consistencies, like tags rendering as blue with an underline and always loaded a new page, but that's long since gone. Nowadays designers are free to make links look and work how they want.
I, personally, don't see the problem with lack of visual design consistency. I prefer to not have every app on my phone look the same.
Android is no longer an ugly-duckling platform trying to catch up with iOS, but a beautiful platform that truly rivals iOS in all important ways -- and now surpasses it in terms of market share. However, mobile app developers have only recently begun to transition from "we need an app for Android too, quick!" to "we need great apps for both Android and iOS," so it will take a little while for all those ugly, hastily-…
I think the mobile OS market is going to end looking somewhat similar to the PC OS market, but changing Windows for Android. The market share race is impossible for Apple to win with their current pricing and model range. It's normal to see a lot of activations if the cheapest phone is $50
Since ICS, Android is beautiful. Well, the OS core is, anyway. Widget makers and the like still don't seem to have got the design memo, but I suspect that's because design talents are so focused on iOS. We just need the app makers to catch up. Foursquare, for instance, has been redesigned and looks great. However, their widgets haven't been touched and look awful by comparison. Spotify has done a far better job of up…
It's not because design talents are focused on iOS, it's that design talents are focused on the Android users that are worth targeting. Namely, people on 2.1 or 2.2+. Android generally monetizes/converts worse than iOS, so those who want a presence on Android can't afford to take advantage of any of the new stuff until old devices are retired sufficiently to make the tradeoff really worth it. It's been really tough t…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But this is not a problem Android has when apps target 4.0. The ActionBar has been a huge stabilizing influence on the Android interaction pattern; strongly enforcing backpaning, swipe-to-navigate, and consistent locations for navigation. I'm not sure why you'd say this. Android actually hasn't suffered from tactile UI fragmentation much more than iOS has.
> Android actually hasn't suffered from tactile UI fragmentation much more than iOS has. If the apps on this page a representative, I'd say that Android has experienced a lot more UI fragmentation than iOS. These are being held up as examples of best Android interfaces, and they look very inconsistent to me. In contrast, I just opened up a bunch of random apps on my phone's home screen, and they all look very much li…
But to my eyes as an Android user, I see a lot of consistency here. The ActionBar is firmly in place, so I know where to go for navigation. The visual metaphors vary in terms of actual look, but I get what's up.
For example, compare to very different apps: Catch and doubleTwist Alarm Clock. Both are "bounded" by their top bar (although Catch has elected to add extra app-specific chrome at the bottom, too). The navigation "upwards our out" between panes is consistently in the upper left. The additional actions for the app as a whole are on the top right.
In cases where the apps deviate (e.g., bottom bars in Gmail and Catch), the designers have had the good sense to use the standardized icons as opposed to further customization, helping to signal the user that this app does deviate from pure actoinbar navigation. The share, attach, favorite, and trash icons are all with pixels of standard.
A lot of iOS users first coming to Android (including myself) after the advent of ICS may be surprised once they realize how consistent the presence of the ActionBar is, even if it varies in appearance. I encourage you to play with one to see this in action. I certainly felt that sense of confusion at first because I'm used to unified navigation chrome from iOS for most things outside of games. I think this is just a case of longtime iOS users not being familiar with the visual language of the Android platform.
This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows. Flagged.
This site contains a stack overflow bug which crashes Firefox and IE9 on Windows. Flagged.