Me on Twitter

#OMG ! I just realised there was SEVERAL apps on #GooglePlay to check the availability of the #nexus devices !! — 11 years 39 weeks ago
"A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs" is called a pangram because it has all the letters of the alphabet. http://t.co/wyzT5YcY9j — 11 years 39 weeks ago
@apkudo Good tool, the GUI needs a good failure overview to make it really useful for developers : we need to identify the problematic cases — 11 years 40 weeks ago
If you post a comment that contains an URL it will be *silently* ignored... #GooglePlay #android http://t.co/f7NPsr714f — 11 years 40 weeks ago
@ippontech Etude bien utile pour débuter dans le dev #mobile. Certains pts gagneraient en clarté avec qques exemples http://t.co/hdA2990pg4 — 11 years 40 weeks ago
Last night I got #android 4.2.2 on my #nexus7 ! I'm getting accustomed to regular updates... It's not so bad... — 11 years 41 weeks ago
Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging - #android by the example http://t.co/KlGqJBM3 — 11 years 41 weeks ago
RT @AskJamesApp: Pour en savoir plus sur moi http://t.co/cyFf1WPs #askjames — 11 years 41 weeks ago
My #AngryBirds Score app for #android : https://t.co/RwQDfUqe. A very limited app compared to the one of @louistouzet but it helps ! — 11 years 43 weeks ago
Just pushed a 277Mb commit to http://t.co/bJgdwBL9 in a couple of minutes : nice tool ! And it's free #bitbucket — 11 years 43 weeks ago

nicobo*playground

Small devices are ignored

Submitted by nicobo on January 13, 2012 - 14:01

This has been annoying me since the beginning : small screen devices are not taken into account by the vast majority of apps editors.

Worse : despite Google's pleading about size-caring (see http://developer.android.com/design), they recommend patterns that actually don't fit the real small screens for which size-caring IS important.
Example : the "action bar" and other icon bars : there is no place for such bars on small screens...

Of course the developer is able to adapt the GUI depending on the size of the screen, but if Google does not make it clear then I fear the battle is already lost...

Here are screenshots of Android Market and Google Reader on an Xperia Mini (HVGA 320x480, 88mm long) :

Android Market on Xperia Mini Google Reader on Xperia Mini

On the left screenshot : buttons zones are not clearly defined and the zoom button is too small, making it difficult to finger-tap them on small screen. Furthermore, one can only see 2 applications from the list (there was a screenful of it in the previous version)...

On the right screenshot : the user is swiping by mistake to the next article because the content is too large for the screen... Ooops too late ! If you swipe back to the previous article you'll have to scroll down again to where you were (this happens to me all the time...).

Another damage of device fragmentation...

Related links

Android Dev Guide : "Supporting Multiple Screens" - http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
Android design site (many informations about size in different places of this site) - http://developer.android.com/design
Screen Sizes and Densities - http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.html

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