Tag Archives: Android

Android niceties: One year on

It’s been a year and two days since I started Android niceties. What a year it’s been!

The site began as an experiment in Tumblr, and got going with this rather misguided post on /r/Android. Considering some of the apps I chose to initially include and the lack of customisation I put into the base theme, it’s little wonder that I got slammed in the comments. There was more than enough encouragement there though.

I plodded on, and woke up to a flurry of emails on December 2, 2011 when Matias Duarte, the head of Android Design shared it on Google+. Then The Next Web a couple of days later, and Gizmodo Brazil a week after that.

The introduction of the official Android Design site by Google earlier this year has really helped Android apps to begin forging their own direction and visual identity. The action bar, the typography, the minimalism. I think it’s safe to say apps look uniquely Android now. Even scrolling through the site in the last five months, you see that coming through loud and clear. 

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Trialling NetBank Vault for Android – #NetBankLab

Commonwealth Bank are piloting their NetBank Vault app on Android. I got to try it this weekend.

Oh, what is it?

It’s a secure online storage service where you can upload, organise and manage all of your files and documents. Think of it like a personal virtual safe deposit box; store receipts, payslips, photos, you get the idea.

I’ve become a heavy Dropbox user lately, and I’m using Google Drive too, for the extra storage space. They’re both pretty similar in their functionality, and both their Android apps are slick.

tl;dr Vault has a long way to go.

The login screen

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The labels above the fields really aren’t needed, and unnecessarily clutter the screen. Tumblr and Pocket are two examples of apps I’ve seen recently that do it cleanly.

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Android UI unification in Ice Cream Sandwich

Well, this post by Min Ming on Android UI fragmentation has certainly been doing the rounds today, and while there is no doubt that UI fragmentation across Android, and even some of their Google-branded offerings exists, instead of looking at how it’s headed in a positive direction, the post chose to pick on some disparate cases. Hey, it wasn’t made up, and the point stands, but below are how the core Google apps in Ice Cream Sandwich are doing things right in terms of unification, and setting a standard developers and UI dudes and dudettes can certainly use as examples.

By the way, Google, you can do SO MUCH MORE to make things easy for developers in providing some rigid guidelines, and ultimately, for your end users, getting accustomed to a consistent experience across the OS and applications. I mean, really, how hard is it to set up some UI patterns like Android Patterns.

Click to embiggen images! This reduced size view does their gloriousness no justice.

Tabs

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The More icon AKA the new Menu

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A few hours in, some quick, inane thoughts on the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich

After what seemed like eons, I finally got a Galaxy Nexus in my hand, and I can safely say that this is a most triumphant marriage of hardware and software!

To be honest, I actually haven’t done a lot with the phone, and apart from reaching for the Menu button in the first few minutes, I feel completely at home. Everything looks a little different, and in some cases, more than a little different, but in every case, as of now anyway, it’s for the better.

I’ll save the screenshot walkthrough for another time, but I’ve got some of the new Gmail app over on Android niceties.

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Kaching and Android. I’m a little confused…

The Commonwealth Bank launched Kaching today.

Kaching

You’ll see quite a few comments in that thread—including my fail—questioning why there wasn’t an Android release, or when it was coming, and CBA responded in that thread, and Andrew Lark replied to me on Twitter saying…

…coming soon. Will launch at same time or close to Apple version. We are committed to both.

I was sated. To be fair, they also mentioned that 91% of mobile visits are from iPhone and Android, of which 79% are from the iPhone. This will change over time, but is a rather compelling argument to go iPhone first.

Then I started reading ZDNet’s Inside CommBank’s Kaching post, and the page on Android confused me.

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Initial thoughts on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and the Galaxy Nexus

That was a fun hour! Live-tweeting the Ice Cream Sandwich live stream, thanks to good ol’ YouTube!

Overall, there is a LOT more polish, everything works incredibly speedily, and the native UI looks and feels better in a million different ways. Stop putting your stupid skins over it, manufacturers; you can’t improve on this.

The Galaxy Nexus looks quite Nexus S-like. 4.65 inch super AMOLED WTFBBQ gorgeous screen, 1280×720 native resolution, 4G / LTE capable, and 3 virtual, on-screen (anchored at the bottom) buttons replacing the physical hardware ones.

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Android niceties: My Android app visual scrapbook

A few weekends ago—to play around with Tumblr more than anything—I started Android niceties.

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I describe it on the blog as…

A collection of screenshots encompassing some of the best looking Android apps, and / or apps with interesting user interfaces, hopefully providing some inspiration or insight into Android UI conventions.

Please note: These apps aren’t all 100% unique to Android in their UI conventions, and some have iPhone equivalents, but I didn’t want to keep it PURELY, UNIQUELY Android if I felt the UI still worked, and didn’t do Android a disservice (e.g. a Back button)

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Siri, publish my thoughts on the iPhone 4S

The new iPhone was announced today. Let’s just look past all the idiocy proliferated by the mass media around “IT’S A 4S, NOT A 5″.

A dual-core A5 Chip, 8MP camera, full 1080p HD video recording and voice commands integrated into some apps through their Siri acquisition.

Siri is getting all the attention. It only works on the iPhone 4S.

I’ve used the voice-to-text features on my Android for over a year, and the only time I’ve found it actually useful is to dictate a text message while driving.

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Where I went yesterday, via my Android phone

You know what? I’m glad this whole phones keeping track of everywhere you go thing happened, because, pushing all those pesky, minor concerns about privacy away, it’s really kind of cool!

Hot on the heels of the iPhone tool that showed us the smorgasbord of data that’s being stored, someone decided to see what Google / Android does. It turns out they store location information as well, just, no way near as much as Apple

After a period of time, 12 hours for cellular data and 48 hours for WiFi data, has passed, the location data is renewed by a new request from Google. It is also limited to a maximum number of entries so that the database doesn’t grow too large. 

Swindon says that the location file pulled from his phone contained roughly 13,000 entries related to cellular network tracking. By contrast the Android file is limited to only 50 entries in the cellular location database.

via The Next Web

Maybe it is just a bug, or lazy programming or whatever on Apple’s part, but it makes sense, especially in Google’s case, where they delete / refresh the data, and you can see it being useful for location-based services.

This same someone that decided to see what Google do, created a Python script that you can feed the Wi-Fi and Cell cache files into, and then output into a .gpx format, to eventually visualise on Google Maps, so I just went ahead and tried it out, purely with my Cell cache file.

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