71–80 of 163 posts
Some of these are really nice. I'm curious how many of these are Android-specific though. Path looks pretty similar on iOS and so do FourSquare, Flipboard etc. Which of these are examples of good mobile design that holds itself on various platforms (iOS, Android etc.) and which are unique to Android?
I just wish I had more than one friend actually using it. Heh.
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 see that as a bad thing and I get irritated every day especially on sites where I need information real fast, like the DMV, police, car insurance website, company careers page or address etc. Mystery meat navigation, especially on hover abounds on the web.
Especially when I am on a phone, quickly getting the info I need for websites and apps is much more important than some slow loading website with 800KB of slow Javascript and retina sized images wrapped in byzantine navigation.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation01.html
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…
But people that don't care about computers the way most readers of this site do aren't happy to be surprised by every new application. Consistency means comfort; even for websites, many of those aimed at general consumption (think newspapers and magazines) aim for simplicity and consistency.
These seem really inconsistent to me. Feedly looks almost like a metro (sorry, "Windows 8-style") app. doubleTwist looks like an iOS app, as do Square Card Reader and Tumblr. Reddit Sync Pro seems to fit in with Google+, so I assume that's what modern Android apps are supposed to look like. None of these general aesthetics are bad, but the inconsistency seems to be an issue. (Actually, a few of them do look bad to me…
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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…
Streaming has nothing to do with UI consistency. It's a battle, because the APIs are very high level and you're limited in the amount of control you have without a ton of work, and it seems like manufacturers are screwing with the stack somewhere. Doesn't matter, though, because we're talking about UI consistency.
The podcatcher app is sort of ripe for some good competition in this space, with Google Listen no longer available. I am working on something. http://imgur.com/RtG8e , but someone else should get in here too.
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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 wish Google would force manufacturers to stop using the 320x240 resolution. The browsing experience is very poor on such a resolution, unless you're using Opera Mini perhaps, and I imagine it's hard for developers to refit their apps for such a small resolution, too, as even menu text will take a lot of space on that resolution. I also wish they mandated everyone has at least 512 MB of RAM in their phones, and at l…
Eventually they will upgrade to a nice Android phone, and will enjoy the enhanced user experience. But cost does matter to some people, and although browsing at 320x240 is hardly ideal, it's probably better than not being able to buy food for a week.
(I personally use very few apps aside from the default Google apps. I mostly want to receive text messages, make phone calls, and browse the web. Apps, to me, don't add much value when the app-maker already has a perfectly fine website.)
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> 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…
I thought you were talking about the actual meaning of taps and swipes and whatnot... that's what I was referring to the as "tactile" part of it, where things like long presses and swipes mean the same thing between apps. In terms of visual style, there has been significant change over the last 18 months as designers come to grips with the new 4.0 style. Both iOS and Android tend to suffer from the problem of "What t…
I personally don't run into a ton of issues in iOS with determining what swipes vs long-presses vs long-taps do. Swipes in a list tend to invoke the "delete" context. Swipes up/down scroll. Tap to invoke. Long-tap for select in a text context. There's certainly not 100% consistency, but it seems fairly consistent to me with the apps I use. I can't speak to how consistent or inconsistent these are on Android, because I haven't used an Android device enough to really know.
Speaking to Catch and doubleTwist, these seem inconsistent to me. Visually, they're quite different, but there seem to be pretty significant functional differences. Many of the doubleTwist screens do not have the "up/out" chevron in the upper left (how is this not redundant with the global "back", anyway?). On the 4th screenshot in particular, there's no "up/out", but there is a settings cog that appears in none of the other screenshots. It appears that doubleTwist also uses a "slide to reveal" metaphor (invoked by the chevron on the main screen) that isn't in Catch or the other apps. In catch, despite there being an action bar at the top, virtually all of the actions you might want to take actually seem to be in the custom bar at the bottom. I don't see how these at all demonstrate consistency.
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…
iOS is an appliance, Android is a computing platform. I want my phone to be a computing platform.
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…
The consistency of the web is very important. That consistency is exactly what lets us look at a new web page and immediately start making sense of it and websites that don't conform to this consistency are the websites that we immediately label "terrible" and "unusable".
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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.
> like the big dogs are prioritizing Android Who are those big dogs? Google? :) Microsoft? :)) Apple? :)))