61–70 of 163 posts
I like the screenshots but I don't understand the navigation of the page and why would you hijack the default scrollbar of your browser? I'm surprised that so apps look WP metro style
By "hijack the default scrollbar", you mean "apply standard webkit scrollbar CSS properties"?
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-…
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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…
However we also know that normal users don't necessarily value consistency as strongly. Many developers have reported that their iOS apps do better with an in-your-face UI.
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…
Yes, that is true, but only for a screen with a back button, otherwise that spot on the screen is probably an "edit" or something else you don't want to do. And after you realize its not "back", you're off hunting around the rest of the screen for the "done" or "cancel" button. Unless of course, you came from a different screen on the same logical "level", where to go back to the screen you came from means picking from one of the row of tabs at the bottom of the screen. Unless you're in an app with a row of tabs at both the top and the bottom of the screen. In that case, the tabs at the top might belong to the page selected at the bottom, or the tabs at the bottom might belong to the page selected at the top, hopefully the UI has been designed with a visual afforance to give you a hint.
Disclaimer: I've been using an iPhone for about 2 months after 2 years of android ownership. They both have their own way of doing things that you can get used to one and think the other feels foreign. FWIW, After time and familiarity, you forget to look at it critically; iOS UI is clunky and unintuitive, its just that us iOS owners have been tossing eachother off about just how great iPhones are for years. And you can't pretend like this isn't true, now that I'm in the club, iDevice owners try to get me to join in some collective pursuance-rationalization quite frequently.
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-…
The apps look great for sure and it seems like the big dogs are prioritizing Android. Many of these examples are in fact on both platforms, and overall they look better on iOS than the android version. On Android they look like a modified, less 'pretty' version of the iOS app- particularly the ones that carry over iOS design patterns.
Who are those big dogs? Google? :) Microsoft? :)) Apple? :)))
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…
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.
(and yes, these apps look fantastic)
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By "hijack the default scrollbar", you mean "apply standard webkit scrollbar CSS properties"?
The page is going off the right edge of my browser, and I can find no way to scroll see it. Call it what you want.
I'm guessing this was designed by someone with a multitouch trackpad. I know I tend to forget not everyone else has 2 finger scroll at their fingertips, I've had to get into a habit of having a test run using a mouse when I put together pages.
It's already known that since ICS Android is prettier and more functional than iOS.
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-…
Is there a way to see how the fragmentation (most important for me: screen size) is at this moment? I've got a low end android phone (Galaxy Mini) which works well but I can't install a lot of stuff (Path comes to mind) because of screen resolution. 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…
I also wish they mandated everyone has at least 512 MB of RAM in their phones, and at least 2 GB for the OS and 2 GB of app space. That way upgrades can be ensured for years, and people, especially regular people, can actually install more than 5 apps without running out of space (and no, App2SD doesn't count, and it's almost useless). And while they are at it, they should also stop supporting the ARMv6 architecture, now that the ARMv7 Cortex A5 and next year Cortex A7 are going to be used.
If Google wants to bring down the hammer on manufacturers, it should be for stuff like this, that ensures users of Android devices, even at the very low-end, get a pretty good experience, otherwise they'll always think Android devices are crap, after their first cheap Android smartphone. They don't want that kind of perception to affect the Android brand in the long term.