13 ms·
Not saying that everything else is bad, but one thing that strikes me is how much they have run out of interesting things now that they had to use fillers[1] li
by rdsubhas 9y ago
Not saying that everything else is bad, but one thing that strikes me is how much they have run out of interesting things now that they had to use fillers[1] like:
Tooltips
Support for tooltips (small popup windows with descriptive text) for views and menu items.
Normally, this would be relegated to a git changelog in the support library. But this is on the global marketing landing page.
I like to imagine a fictional internal mail thread going like this:
> Folks! please, give us something, anything, to put on the landing page!
> Someone replies duh, maybe tooltips
> What's a tooltip?
> uhh, small popup windows with descriptive text
> What's a popup window?
> uhh...
> Nevermind, its on!
Obligatory /s and yeah its Google, but seriously I can't imagine any other circumstances on how this specific copy, which tries to explain what a "tooltip" is by using the words "popup window", "view" and "menu item", came up.
This could be a good sign though, of the maturity of the platform (and harder to feel left out if you didn't upgrade).
1: https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/ https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/
- moneymakersucks 9y agoHonestly, I prefer this over the popular alternative of making UX changes for the sake of adding something new.
- bichiliad 9y agoI'd probably give most places the benefit of the doubt — companies will rarely make UX or UI changes just because. There's usually a problem they are aiming to solve, and the solution they choose is some sort of interaction. Is it always the right answer? That's up to the users.
- jakub_g 9y agoRaymond Chen (core Windows engineer) once explained in his book that some UI changes are near-mandatory (at least for paid product) for most people to feel that the upgrade is/was worth it. Say the engineers have done massive internal performance and stability improvements, better filesystem and what not; but those things are almost invisible to regular users. Most users want something more tangible, otherwise they will have hard time to justify spending few hundred bucks as they will feel "it's the same as before, I see no difference". It's also (my theory) a bit of identity thing. All big companies slightly tweak their logo (even if it's just changing or removing shadow thickness) every decade or so that it feels fresh. The same applies to UI of applications and OSes.
- digi_owl 9y agoAnd here i sit, using a WM that has not changed in ages...
- tauntz 9y agoNoticed the same but for a different item in the changelog. "TextView autosizing" - it's such a minor thing and could well be a minor changelog item in the support library update..
- kllrnohj 9y agoThat actually got some decent cheers at Google I/O iirc, it's bigger than it sounds at first. It's scaling the font size of the text to fit the available space, which is a fairly unique twist and is great for localization efforts (looking at you, German...)
- tauntz 9y agoDon't get me wrong, the feature itself is indeed useful. It's just that its so.. minor. If you ever wanted to implement this in your app then there are multiple ready-made solutions for this or you could write your own in a short amount of time. Presenting this as one of the key new features in a major new OS versions seems just strange.. like there wasn't anything else substantial.
- nevir 9y agoIt's really hard to do well, and in a performant manner. I'm glad they built it. Measuring glyphs, dealing with reflow, kerning, whitespace breaking rules, etc is no fun
- spookyuser 9y agoNot only that but would non Android developers even understand the feature?
- methodin 9y agoI imagine there are plenty of instances where apps do not account for space well
- 9y ago
- klondike_ 9y agoI'd imagine there are a lot of performance updates which would be too technical for the marketing page, so they filled the space with minor enhancements instead
- drampelt 9y agoI think a lot of major changes are in Google's apps, not Android itself. For example a big update to the Photos app would be part of a major OS update in iOS but just another regular app update on Android.
- digi_owl 9y agoBingo. That is one of the big things that annoy me when i hear people talk about iOS updates. Because when Apple announce their big updates, often the items they present will not be present on older devices for various "reasons". Thus what most people got where perhaps some security updates and some spurious API changes so that all those apps have to be updated or stop working. Apple, during Jobs both terms, were more marketing than anything. Watch them slowly slide back into 90s mediocrity outside of USA now that he is no longer around to apply his "reality distortion field".
- vacri 9y agoYou had to scroll past quite a few animated announcements and read past several lines of other updates in order to find this 'also-ran' item in the footnote.
- weberc2 9y agoTo be fair, I have an iPhone and I'm still waiting for the "remotely sane text selection" feature to ship. Just in case you think this is hyperbole: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhWz7rMj56Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhWz7rMj56Y
- goldbricked 9y agoMost of that doesn't happen in Brave, fwiw.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mrb 9y agoThat is nuts. I had no idea such a basic feature was so broken on the iPhone.
- pilif 9y agoSo it's not just me? I thought I must be doing something wrong between all these people talking about using their iPads as their main work machines and then text selection just doesn't work for me most of the time. I really wonder what's going on here.
- boojing 9y agoI just tried the 7+'s text selection and it works great unlike in that video.
- weberc2 9y agoGood to know. This is probably my biggest frustration with the iPhone. Any interaction with text is miserable, and it has been forever. Somehow Apple has not seemed to care for 6 generations.
- koffiezet 9y agoPretty horrible indeed, though limited mostly to Safari (which incidentally is one of the places you want to use it more often than in others in my experience)
- flukus 9y agoHow do tooltips even work on a touch based OS?
- grzm 9y agoThe only place I can recall using tooltips (if I understand what you're referring to) on iOS is to read the extra caption on XCKD (the title attribute of the img element), which you access by press and hold.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoAndroid has long has deep support for keyboard and mouse navigation where this could be more useful.
- digi_owl 9y agoIndeed. It is one of those things that seems to go unspoken of, because even Google don't want to acknowledge that they once tried to pitch Android as more than a media consumption platform (Android 3.0, aka honeycomb, aka the tablet/landscape focused Android variant).
- pjmlp 9y agoWhich lead to the situation that although Windows Phone failed in the market, Windows 10 seems to be on good track to win the hybrid tablets market. All the consumer stores on my city have mostly Windows 10 hybrid laptops on sale, with the exception of a few Samsung and Huawei ones with Android.
- digi_owl 9y agoIn particular as Microsoft has waved the license on smaller screens. The other day i found a 10" tablet with a keyboard dock and no less than two A ports on the tablet part. I am presently contemplating grabbing one to use with a RTLSDR dongle i picked up on a lark.
- mlnj 9y ago
- dingo_bat 9y agoAt least they are bringing back PIP. This was such a great regression in N for Samsung users.
- shaklee3 9y agoPIP somewhat exists already. Some apps, like tinycam already do it.
- Natanael_L 9y agoThat's an overlay, rather than using windowing features. And they don't scale quite the same way into full-screen apps. This ought to be easier to implement for most apps since Android itself handles most of the window management and since rendering shouldn't change too much.