Pixels and Parentheses

This past week Google unveiled Currents, a new page to counter the growing Flipboard-style apps. The idea is great, you can subscribe to rss feeds and websites and your content is automatically fetched and displayed in the app. Android has feedly, a great app, but it has its own limitations. With Currents, Google is heading to combat the growing number of RSS/News reader apps that do more than just list articles; they make reading those articles fun and inviting. Did Google pull it off?

Yes and No. The problem? The bastardized UI that seems more like a test drive than an honest attempt to tackle the expanding news reader market. While the content is here, the UI just falls short. What are the problems? Read on and find out.

The Bottom Bar…

Firstly, why did Google avoid the Action Bar pattern in this app? Instead of doing that, Google has given us a row of icons on the bottom of the app. Lets go through them and how much they don’t work.

Back Button Madness

Yes, that’s right. Usually relegated to cheap iOS-to-Android ports, Currents has its own little “back” button on the bottom left of the screen.

Never mind the fact that Google replicating behavior that is already in Android (hint: the back button). What does adding this button exactly provide for the user? I’d love to hear from Google on this.

The operation of the button is also maddening. Half the time it does what you expect it to, and the other half you are left scratching your head wondering what the hell just happened.

The Home button

First of all, what does this button even do? Back to the top level of the app? Or the “table of contents”? When presented with the latest Android 4.0, it becomes even more confusing, as we now have 2 back buttons and 2 home buttons on the current screen.

Button Madness!

The right button

Ok, press this to go to the next article…great… well then how do  you go to the previous one if you press it by mistake? Press back? Nope, that takes you to the table of contents page thing. Press back on Android system bar? Nope, that goes back to table of contents page yet again. You simply cannot do it. This is UI 101, Google.

Overall, these buttons don’t work. Even worse, none of them have any sort of visual indicator that they have been pressed, making their use even less inviting.

Full Screen?

I’ll be concise here: Why? What does it add to the experience? How do I get it back? I want to see my notifications, damn it.

Settings

And what is this little nugget of mystery? When I press menu in Android, I expect a menu, not this. This is confusing. This is too much. What is wrong with the regular system page that you use for *every* single other app? This is the definition of over-design; a solution in search of a problem; and a terrible way to provide some simple ways to customize an app. Report Abuse? Feedback? About? Nobody cares about that shit. Get rid of it.

A nice start

Overall, Currents is a good entry into the market, albeit with a confusing UI. I hope version 2.0 address these issues.

The Twitter Action Bar and Dashboard

One of the new features Google is introducing in Android is the Action Bar– a way to give users a constant place for the most basic actions in an app, as well as provide a means back to the Dashboard, another newer feature. It can be seen in some newer, better-designed apps, such as Twitter.

So, you wanna implement the Action Bar?

Awesome! While the current Android APIs don’t have a standard Action Bar, you can implement on via a couple third-party libraries. Johannilsson over at Github has created a very awesome library that makes it super easy to add an action bar to your apps. It is used very simply by:

ActionBar actionBar = (ActionBar) findViewById(R.id.actionbar);

What is possible with this goodness?

I have started experimenting with the Action bar, and have developed some pretty compelling uis:

My first Action Bar Implementation

Examples Examples!

Need some examples? Google has an entire app, complete with their own Actionbar, over at iosched. Download it and play around!

There it is! All in it’s wood paneled glory–an Android application-to-be. So what am I *trying* to make? Well, right now, no idea. On the right is a conceptual draft of a planner/organizer aimed at college students. It would collate classes, assignments, notes, and other things to help students organize their lives.

This blog, hopefully, will follow me through learning the Android development process. More to come soon!