2. The situation you're talking about has existed since... well, it's been there for the last 3 years I've been using Google Calendar. I, too, would like a working back button, but the web UI is effectively set in stone.
Love google calendar for the cloud, sharing and ability to email myself custom reminders but the UI on the web is pretty minimal. I tried a couple different calendar apps and found fantastical by flexbits.com to have the best UI/functionality for me on iPhone.
[1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/meaningful-trans...
For pure usability, I haven't found a calendar program that beats MS Outlook running on Windows.
Also note that Yosemite added event suggestions when adding new events to the OS X Calendar app (but I don't believe iOS added anything like that for the iOS app). I haven't had a chance to experiment with it yet (since I primarily do event entry in iOS), but it looks pretty straightforward.
Sidenote: you people on the "tech internet" use the word innovation too much
This seems like a strange hard rule to follow. The disorganized demo has a very different "feel" to it that might be appropriate in some places more than others.
Watching the Don't video legitimately hurt my brain; the only way an app can justify that kind of choreography is if disorientation is an intended part of the emotional experience.
It's also just a guideline, a suggestion, and if you think your app would benefit from having items fly in and out in all directions, if that's the feel you want to give your users, that's your choice. It's just probably not the right choice in most cases.
What do you mean by this? With iOS 7, there was a big outcry, because they changed the aesthetics of the OS pretty significantly, but that was a one-time event (and also highly subjective). But this is the first time I've heard anyone imply that Apple is trending towards having worse design. If anything, with the removal of skeuomorphism, Apple's design is more consistent than ever.
> google appears to be finally paying due respect to good design and really putting the work in.
My impression upon watching the video was that it looks very much like a 3rd-party iOS app. I am glad to see Google putting effort into their design. Although I don't agree with all of their choices (for example, I think the "Schedule View" image really is kind of awful, because it adds a lot of visual clutter and inconsistency, making it harder to scan the information quickly).
A lot of people liked the skeumorphic designs. It made the technology feel polished, beautiful and natural. Not to mention textures work way better than transparent colors when you're watching, say, a video with a white background so you can't even see the controls. Oh and hey, try swiping up from the bottom in the Camera app - Whoops!
And what's with the puke neon green for status bars during phonecalls that you can hardly read white text on? What's with the complete breakage of the browser UI with a subsequent "minimal-ui" apology all of which is then reverted back in iOS 8?
For that matter, sending group messages in apps is still horribly broken since iOS 7. And iOS 8.1 was a disaster and was recalled quickly.
Yeah, Apple's design changed, and not for the better.
What the current Android leadership simply don't understand is that there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS, not because they couldn't afford it. iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening, since if people wanted the iOS experience they might as well get the real thing.
Design fascism works when you're in a niche, but will never be mass market. Windows Phone is similarly lauded in design circles but mysteriously fails to sell, and this is why. The crowds praising all these "improvements" are the sort of people that actually thought Windows Mobile was not only tolerable, but a good idea.
My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch, and they aren't too concerned about existing users, but the side effect of this is that all of the major smartphone OSs have reached the same level of out-of-touch ness that we had prior to the original iPhone coming along.
Huh? I've been an Android user since the days of the Moto Droid, and I really like the design direction they're taking. It's clean, it's not full of crappy, drastic gradients and obscene amounts of clutter. Some of the menus/lists are organized better now, which I greatly appreciate. The Music app is actually bearable now. The Gmail app is better than ever for my usage cases.
The only thing that annoys me is the new Message app removing the ability to swipe convos off when you are "done" with them. But that's a small little annoyance to get all of the other goodies.
I'm sure there are others that hate it, but it's not like everyone does. I'm more satisfied with my phone now than I've ever been.
Do you have any data to back this up? From what I can tell, a majority of Lollipop reviews trend positive.
> there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS
Again, is this your presumption or do you have any source to back this up?
> iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening
A critical mass of my Android using network welcome and love the refreshing new look. Does that prove anything though? No, because my network doesn't include ~1 billion other Android users [1].
Design is a pretty subjective field, and what appeals to you doesn't necessarily appeal to others. You never really know what the majority camp is without an extensive study. What really gets me is when people start projecting their opinions as facts.
[1] http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/25/google-io-2014-by-the-num...
On the other hand, I guess that scanning a large amount of emails is the precise thing that allows them to offer robust email-to-event conversion. But I wish that this sort of thing would work locally (on the cellphone or computer in question), not on a remote server somewhere.
I'm genuinely on the fence on this one. I'm rather cavalier on privacy issues (at least where they affect my own person) and quite happy with the goodies I receive in return. However I sometimes wonder how I'll feel with the benefit of hindsight.
Another odd case I ran into is parents trying to prevent their children getting into the Google ecosystem until they're mid-teen level. This is manifesting in resistance to their education stuff being adopted by schools.
They're trying to imitate Apple's adverts but completely blow it by showing overcomplicated interactions.
Nominative determinism in action folks
>Nominative determinism in action folks
Selection|Reporting|Sampling bias in action folks.
;0)
It shocks me that the default calendar for android does not interoperate with any calendar server except gmail's (unless you can shoe-horn events in with a separate caldav app.)
But, the Android Calendar would be much better if it would work with other calendar servers besides Gmail. If google called the Android Calendar the Gmail Calendar App, it would be more appropriate. But, this current default android calendar app doesn't use the CalDav protocol and only works with the gmail calendar. This is very peculiar behavior and not what I'd expect from google.
Even after I purposely tried to focus on the device UI, I couldn't process all of it in any coherent way. Please don't make promo videos that leave me with no sense of the product you are trying to demo.
Is Google going to roll out new versions of their other apps? Do they plan to maintain both apps in parallel, and for how long? Is this just an experiment or do they plan to convert all users to the new apps eventually?
All the Android and Web apps are being updated at the moment for Material Design, with the higher priority being on the Android ones it seems to get them ready in time for the imminent 5.0 launch. They're just updating the app for everyone (the new ones are backwards compatible with less flashy animations). Inbox is a separate app though.
Despite being famously "backed by Google", I'm not sure about how many real-world Google properties actually use Angular yet. Most actual Google web apps still very much revolve around a technology stack from 5 years ago. Do as I say, not as I do...
Regardless, what does the JavaScript library for their web apps have to do with their native mobile apps?
The new Calendar uses the same architecture as Inbox, read into that what you will.
Google Sheets uses GWT in much the same way as Inbox.
Then there's AdWords, Google Shopping Expression, Flights, Hotels, Android Play Console, Google Wallet, Google Groups, and a bunch of new apps coming up.
There are 3,000 engineers internally using GWT, and we record 150,000 monthly active unique users hitting our SDK update servers. Last time I checked, about 20,000 unique domains use GWT.
Apple (iAds Workspace), Amazon (AWS Console), Nike, etc use GWT.
Google Maps has never used GWT, although there were internal prototypes.
As to what this has to do with native mobile apps, it has a lot.
We have built separate Hybrid apps. Hybrid not in the sense of PhoneGap, but in the sense that we mix native code and cross-compiled Java together.
Inbox has a core set of client side (non-UI) logic representing about 70% of the code base. This is written in Java.
GWT is used to cross-compile this code into a library for the Web, it is type-annotated with JsDoc, and then the remaining UI code is done with Closure. This gives us cross-language type-checking and optimization (Closure will flag as error if JS->Java or Java->JS calls are wrong)
j2objc is used to cross-compile the shared code into Objective-C for iOS. The remaining portion (UI critical code) is done with traditional XCode toolchain.
For GWT Users who are interested, I am giving a deeper presentation on GMail's Inbox architecture at this year's GWT.create conference (http://gwtcreate.com/).
* Google Contacts is GWT
* Orkut was/is GWT
Frankly, I want my calendar to be a private calendar. I don't want to share it, or receive invites through it, or auto-add events just because I got an email. I'm still happy to have the sync capability, because I use a smartphone, but aside from that I really have no use cases which require my calendar to be online at all.
Admittedly, this may just be a case where Google's interests are not aligned with my own. If so, are there (real, viable) alternatives?
Fortunately you can turn this off in the Google Calendar settings. This way they only get added to your calendar if you accept.
I wanted a private calendar without sharing/invites too, so I ended up building my own (do not recommend unless you have a lot of time on your hands!).
No spam, no ads, you own your data. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about it.
Not sure why they can't do this, the default Calendar app that ships with Samsung phones pulls it off beautifully.
Eg - Typing "Dinner tomorrow at 7:30pm at Foobar restaurant" would automatically create an event with the correct lexical components.
It looks like they're finally reintroducing this back.
Pretty much all software (whether that's apps, websites, programming languages, or anything else) past a certain complexity has quirks. Getting used to the quirks is part of learning the software.
Massively changing large swathes of your built-in software is bad for users! I get that it'd be suicide to say "OK, permanent feature freeze... now," but big changes to the UI on apps that are (to many normal users) fundamental to using Android break the user's understanding of their use, often amounting to months of acclimation down the drain.
It's very frustrating.
The hamburger menu is in fashion. Then it isn't. Swiping from the left is, then it isn't. All of the examples in their design spec of how NOT to do things was precisely what they did on 2.x.
I know you have to be seen to be "innovating" for attention-deficit new phone buyers, but living in a world of constantly shifting sands just means it's hard to see from all the dust blowing around in your face.
I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do.
Any recommendations?
i can see this at a glance in classic calendars. i cannot in this agenda/stream view.
yay, progress.
