Tag Archives: customer experience

GDG-DC Sept 6th

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I had the privilege of being one of the 200 or so attending a Google Dev Group meeting in which a few of Google’s Android Developer Advocates gave a couple of talks as well as had the AOL development team present a demo of their work which will soon be published in the market.  The meeting was held in an auditorium of AOL’s campus which was pretty nice and could hold easily hold the 200 attendees. The Google guys bought tons of pizza for everyone.  A big thanks to both AOL for the room and Google for the food. =D  If you follow the meeting link, you can see the pictures taken at that event.

The first speaker was David Chandler who is the primary developer behind the WebView widget and is the primary force behind GWT. He was in town for the FCC’s meeting on Accessibility in Mobile Apps and the Mobile Web and agreed to be one of the speakers for this little shindig.  He talked about WebView apps and how many of them are designed on-the-cheap as a way to target several different mobile ecosystems with one app.  He pointed out how many of them are also designed to look like an iOS app… which is incongruous and confusing for an Android user and basically to “don’t do that”.  I learned that AsyncTasks are great for background tasks, but not for a task that may get killed mid-run if the device orientation changes as they will get cancelled (use a Service instead).  Spring Android is an open source project with a REST encapsulation set of classes to make those kinds of calls easy inside Android.  Building a service around Spring Android would be the best practice, but you can put it anywhere you like, even inside an AsyncTask.

Android 4.1 (JellyBean) introduced a new set of notifications, with a much larger size and buttons and even a short list.  One of the problems with this new set was a fairly hidden feature of the expandable notification (hidden because it isn’t really discoverable):  some notifications can be expanded if you use two fingers to “pull down” which would expand it.  Not really something hinted at visually and, for people like me, impossible to discover because I am usually using the phone one handed, preventing the use of two finger gestures most times.

The Google I/O 2012 App demonstrating many of the new features is still available on Google Play, but not for much longer. Source code for the app will be available for a long time to come and can be seen/downloaded from here. Demonstrated features include: the new notifications, ICS calendar integration, GCM (successor to C2DM – push notification from web server), Android Beam (using the NFC), and more.

David then went on to discuss the FCC meeting on Accessibility and proceeded to talk about various quick and easy ways to vastly improve accessibility of an app for the visually impaired.  He gave a short example of a slider bar and how, even with text to speech enabled with various text being read as you operated it, the UX is quite cumbersome.  Supplementing the slider bar with simple + and – buttons to move the slider up and down did not add much complexity, but made the task of properly setting the value of the slider so much easier by just using those simple buttons instead.

The AOL Android development team gave their demonstration next and they showed off their fairly sophisticated magazine reader app that had multiple call outs, gesture actions, vertical page scrolling, and even content drill down based on hot spots defined in the xml content.  The thing I found most fascinating was their ability to hook up a device directly to the screen projector and show off the app that way (at least for the tablet, their phone could not hook up).  When I inquired about that ability after the event, they said it was a Motorola Xoom with an HDMI port.  After I got home, I immediately checked my ASUS tablet for such a port and found it has a microHDMI output.  The Samsung Galaxy S III handset also has one, so I may need to get one of those kinds of phones the next time I need to do a presentation with a handset.  AOL On is a new Google TV app that will add feature rich content from AOL as a set of new channels for you to watch on your Google TV, including HuffLive.  While I technically found the apps presented impressive, I don’t typically read the magazines they would be delivering nor do I have a Google TV.  Others will have to comment about them once they get published (which should be soon, this was the first time anyone outside AOL got to see anything about them).

Adam Koch and Roman Nurik came down from Google’s NYC office to give a micro version of their Google IO presentation about the features of JellyBean (4.1), best practices for UI design, and how best to design and develop with the Nexus 7… which is quirky because of it’s default portrait mode instead of landscape, being 7″ with a “tvdpi” of 213dpi, and only a front facing camera. They talked about UI design, UX should be “butter” (smooth — opposite of “janky”), making sure we have “hardware acceleration” option turned on in our apps and that we should all review the design guidelines with regards to how the new Up button behaves (which is the app icon) vs. the Back button which has been around forever. A special note was said to pay attention to the new activity attribute parentActivityName and the TaskStackBuilder class.

Adam asked at one point during his talk if anyone created a “universal app” which targeted any and all screen sizes. As far as I know, I was the only one to raise my hand.  He asked me about the challenges I faced and I mentioned all the different layout folders and value folders necessary to create such apps.  During Roman’s talk about best practices for UI design in helping to support “universal screen apps”, he asked the audience to see how many were using the “smallest width” layout filter (i.e. layout-sw600 folder for 7″ tablet layouts as apposed to “layout” for handsets and “layout-sw720″ for 10” tablets).  When Roman saw that I was the only one with my hand up, he commented “Only one? That’s very disappointing. You all should be using it”. It made me realize that my development process and experience is not only valuable, but rare, too (around here, at least).

All in all, it was a very informative 2 hour set of talks and demonstrations and I appreciated every minute of it.  Thanks again to Google and AOL for sponsoring the event and presenting something like that. Very cool. =)

As I left the parking garage at AOL’s campus, I was greeting with this warning sign.

Crosswalk warning sign at AOL

SD Card speed class explained

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What class memory card to get for the Nexus One

I was on the Google help forums this morning and I read a post by a guy who said he was getting a 16 gig class 6 memory card for his Nexus One so I figured I would come on here and explain why this individual is spending more money than necessary.

There are two things you need to consider when buying a memory card..

  • Size
  • Speed

I think most people understand size numbers. The bigger the number, the more music, pics, video, etc you can store on the card.

Speed on the other hand is a bit of a mystery to some.  Continue reading →

Android: Programmatically Show the Soft Keyboard, If Needed

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If you are expecting user input, a polite app will check to see if there is a hardware keyboard and if one is not present, then automatically display one so the user does not have to click the edit box first in order to pop one up. This kind of behavior is especially nice if there is only one input box being presented. While there are a few methods available out on the net in various places, I wrote my own to be compatible with Android 1.5+ and works in all cases where a keyboard is not part of the physical device as well as does nothing if a physical device has a keyboard.

The source code provided is written from the perspective of a static utility class.

    /**
     * Show soft keyboard if device does not already have a hardware one available.
     * @param aView - the View that will receive the keyboard input
     */
    public static void popKeyboard(final View aView) {
        aView.post(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                ((InputMethodManager)aView.getContext().getSystemService(
                        Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE)).showSoftInput(aView,
                        InputMethodManager.SHOW_IMPLICIT);
            }
        });
    }

Android ListView and setSelection

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Android’s ListView is a powerful class that is capable of presenting a list of whatever you wish fairly easily. One of the issues that has vexed me has been scrolling the ListView to a particular entry. While newer Android versions have provided better support in this area, trying to maintain backward compatibility with Android 1.5 presents some challenges. In light of this Google issue and it’s comments, I have come up with a decent method of scrolling a ListView to a particular position if it is not already visible. I clear the focus after setting the selection because users became confused at why an “orange box suddenly appeared” when they did not expressly tap a selection with their finger or scroll with the trackball.

//this method would be part of a ListView class
    @Override
    public void scrollToPosition(final int anItemPos) {
        if (anItemPos!=AdapterView.INVALID_POSITION) {
            int theFirstItemPos = getFirstVisibleItemPos();
            int theLastItemPos = getLastVisibleItemPos();
            if (anItemPos<theFirstItemPos || theLastItemPos<anItemPos) {
                getListView().post(new Runnable() {
                    @Override
                    public void run() {
                        getListView().setSelection(anItemPos);
                        getListView().clearFocus();
                    }    
                });
            }
        }
    }

Android Dialog Button onClicks

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One practice I’ve come to standardize in my apps has been to take dialogs with buttons that perform some kind of action or processing and then dismiss the dialog and instead place that dismiss() call as the very first line within the onClick handler.

new View.OnClickListener() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View v) {
        my_final_dialog_var.dismiss();
        Thread.yield(); //optional
        /* do my action here */
    };
}

On some of the more sensitive operations (like file delete), I even put a Thread.yield(); after the dismiss so that the dialog will be sure to go away before any more processing is done. The reason you want to dismiss the dialog right away is so that you avoid getting occasional double presses in case the phone is slow to perform your process or action. Nothing is worse from a user’s perspective than to have the phone not react fast enough and so will keep pressing buttons in the hopes that it will finally do something. If you code your buttons to do something each time a button is clicked, then you can have potentially disastrous results. In my case, having multiple file deletes would be a disaster when the user only wanted to delete one file and the phone just hiccuped on the confirmation dialog. Immediately dismissing the dialog gets rid of the temptation to hit the button multiple times while it is doing it’s job.

Android app shortcuts and class names

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I recently learned the hard way that refactoring your old code to be more consistent with how you write code now as opposed to how you wrote it a year ago can be dangerous. Things like class names may seem like a completely internal mechanism and is in most cases, but the rule for that changes the moment you place one into the AndroidManifest.xml. Continue reading →

Android: Always create a Launcher activity!

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ALWAYS CREATE A LAUNCHER ACTIVITY!

I cannot stress that enough. When I created AttachSave, I designed it with the intention that it would be a small, hidden app that did not clutter up the launcher tray with useless apps that couldn’t be run traditionally anyway. Despite warnings from others posted elsewhere, I thought making the description quite clear on how to use the app would be sufficient to teach people on how to use the app. Continue reading →