Why PBS Won't Do Android 331
bogaboga writes "You might be wondering why the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service doesn't have a compelling Android footprint. I was wondering too; until they provided the answer. They say, 'Simply put, it’s too complicated for us to even consider an Android app for the first version; we’ll continue to support those viewers with mobile web. ... As we’re focused on the tablet for this project, we’re only designing for the larger screen sizes. But even there, there are a wide range of sizes and aspect ratios. It’s possible to build flexible sizing for these screen layouts, just as we do for the range of desktop web screen sizes. But the flip side to these wide variations is that in a touch experience, ergonomics plays an important role in the design. Navigational elements need to be within easy reach of the edges of the screens since people often are holding their tablets. If the experience is not fine-tuned to each variation the experience would suffer.' They also cite fragmentation. I'm left wondering whether they didn't find support for various screen sizes on Android developer website. Their budget is undoubtedly limited; are their concerns legit? What companies and organizations have developed Android applications that are good to work with on various screen sizes?"
The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
This mentality is not uncommon. Someone will see that there might be a problem somewhere and conclude that because they cannot have their vision of perfection, that they simply won't try at all. Consider this a victory for all of those screetching fanboys. They have achieved their desired result: FUD.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be useful.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case their mobile web presence has the Android devices covered. It's not perfect but it is useful so why make a native app?
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It's not just that they are favoring one proprietary platform vendor over everyone else but that they are also repeating their FUD too.
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It's not just that they are favoring one proprietary platform vendor over everyone else but that they are also repeating their FUD too.
Is it really FUD to say that all the varying screen sizes, etc, make it harder to code a well designed solution? The same issues were raised when the iPhone 5 changed the screen size.
Not to give MS & Windows any credit they don't deserve, but it is a small miracle to be able to support a clusterfuck of hardware combinations & video resolutions. We've all seen the problems Linux has with getting vendors to supply quality drivers. As the mix of possible hardware components & software versions incr
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
But in the case of PCs, the variation is from "plenty big enough" to enormous. You can aim at the lowest common denominator on the PC and it's fine, and if the user has more real estate, great. On phones, you really have to take advantage of the space the machine gives you.
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Since the PBS app is made to look like the website or vice versa, this intelligent point unfortunately has no relation to the current dicussion. PBS is not thinking about human factors at all. They're thinking about keeping exactly the same over-wigeted look on all platforms.
Reality is not FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
they are also repeating their FUD
No, it's that after actually examining real technical issues they found the FUD was not FUD at all, but a reality based concern where web apps on Android was the only feasible approach given the funds they had.
I am surprised more companies don't go the web route to support android - responsive design helps address the broad scale with many small increments, and Google has focused a ton on Chrome speed improvements over the ability to update older systems with newer development frameworks.
Re:Reality is not FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wish more places stayed with websites instead of apps. I don't want to download an app for every place I could just visit on the web.
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Exactly!
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Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Interesting)
"There was a time when everybody thought information and presentation should be separated, and layout should be left to algorithms. Well, that idea failed."
Nonsense. The idea works brilliantly.
Oh, you mean it was rejected by marketing and 'design?' Marketing always wants something new, it can be deeply inferior and that's just fine, that just makes it easier to sell the next piece of crap. Design just wants an excuse to keep fingerpainting and getting paid for it, and in the process they usually find new and interesting ways to break a UI (but never seem all that concerned about fixing one.)
TeX is far superior to any sort of Word Processor, but no one is going to make a mint off it so you will have to figure that out by yourself instead of letting the ads tell you what to do.
Making an app to do something that is already handled just fine in my browser sounds like a waste of time and effort anyhow.
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In that case their mobile web presence has the Android devices covered. It's not perfect but it is useful so why make a native app?
How come that the "mobile web presence" doesn't suffer from the same problem on the same range of devices? So they *can* have a flexible-size layout that's they consider adequate in HTML5, but not in native code? How does that *not* sound like a lame excuse?
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because user expectations of native apps are higher than those of web apps.
Users accept when top level UI elements of a web app scroll. They don't accept that with a native app. When was the last time you saw a native app scroll it's primary menu off the top of the screen for example. Most web apps do.
That is actually very true (Score:2)
So they *can* have a flexible-size layout that's they consider adequate in HTML5, but not in native code?
Yes, exactly!! That is exactly true. I don't think you understand how different layout is between a web vs.a native app. Some things that are very easy on the web are much harder in a native app. In fact this causes a lot of headaches for native developers who have clients that expect some things are easy because of web development...
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I wish all mobile apps for websites would die horribly. Mobile web works, and works pretty much everywhere.
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http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/ [sealedabstract.com]
That is exactly backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't make mobile web *apps*, make mobile web *sites*.
NO! 10000x NO!
Mobile web sites, without exception (that includes you SLashdot) SUCK HORRIBLY.
I can use any modern mobile browser to easily read a normal website. Do NOT give me a feature-reduced 1998 version of your website.
What COULD work, is making a mobile web-app for your site that acts much like a native app, but provides some specialized features hard to do with a pure web page. But it would be totally a side thing and not replace the main site at all.
Apps when done right enhance what you do with a site. Mobile versions of a web page invariably detract.
So if you are going to go web-mobile, make it an app.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Informative)
We've been doing some augmented reality games at the studio where I work lately. We build what we need in maya/max and move it to Unity for the build. With iOS, it's about a 10 minute ordeal to build and test it and use Testflight to send it around the office very quickly.
It was so easy that we decided to give it a shot for Android, I mean... it's like doubling your market right? Well... no. First most of the droid phones need special drivers, and they aren't easy to find. Then you have to build based on which version of the droidOS you are using, which on some phones is a pain to get because they don't list it outright. (Confusion between firmware vs. os version, etc. Keep in mind we are game devs not programmers.)
Googleusb doesn't always work properly, we spend hours if not days trying to get a build to work properly on various phones. It's a fucking ordeal let me tell you. We dropped Android support for the project and all future projects as a result. Not worth the time and effort until there is a more unifying experience between them. The cost was X to do iphone development, it's X*15 for droid.
Now this is just one very small segment and one that is not like the environments used by the more elite programmers that visit this site. But if a studio of 20 people who already have it working properly in iOS cannot get it working right on Droid, well.... forget droid.
Our version of perfection is "working without days of hassle to get the right drivers, firmware, etc for *each* phone we want to test it on." If that is who you are decrying, well...
As an artist, it DOES have to be perfect. Sorry you feel differently, but that's the reality. It's programmers like yourself who feel that it *doesn't* have to be perfect that make developing for Droid such a giant pain in the ass for us little guys.
I don't love Apple, but fuck if I want to spend any more late nights and weekends trying to get droid phones to work properly.
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:5, Insightful)
The mind boggles, not only that a place developing games for computers has no programmers on staff - but that they fail to see this as a problem. Worse yet, they think that programmers *are* the problem.
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Well... no. First most of the droid phones need special drivers, and they aren't easy to find.
I'm worried now. I've had both HTC and Samsung phones and when you install their desktop app it installs the drivers too. Google reference devices have the drivers in the SDK. You can also use wifi for development, no drivers required.
What device were you trying?
Then you have to build based on which version of the droidOS you are using, which on some phones is a pain to get because they don't list it outright.
It's clearly displayed on the "about" page of the settings app.
It's a fucking ordeal let me tell you.
Strange, we had no issues beyond finding the password for our wifi network. My friend has been working on some Unity based open source game for a while now and did an Android version in
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A good comparison is the BBC's iPlayer app. After a year it's just starting to reach parity with the iOS's initial version in features and video quality. The development team is 3x the size of the iOS version. That still doesn't fully take into account the extra support costs they incur from Android users, which they say is significantly more than iOS.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20754182 [bbc.co.uk]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Video-on-Android-Devices-Update [bbc.co.uk]
And if you're targeting tablets, with
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But that's not exactly what PBS did. They provide an open/standards way of accessing the content via the Web. They've then looked at developing native apps, and saw that it was easy enough on iOS, but not so much on Android.
Should a public organization not do any platform unless it does them all? While that may sound "fair", it's potentially restricting them in ways that would be unreasonable. For example, if they could do Android and iOS, would the same rule apply for people complaining about Windows P
Re:The perfect is the enemy of the good. (Score:4, Informative)
As I've said repeatedly, a public organization choosing a platform with a single hardware and software source when there are options available that give you choice should be considered criminal. This is especially true when that platform has a penchant for censorship.
The problem is that there is too much choice.
And this isn't unique to PBS: the BBC's Android team is three times larger then their iOS team because of the same fragmentation issue.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/posts/Video-on-Android-Devices-Update
If you only have a fixed amount of resources then you have to decide where to put them, and it's easier and faster for them get something out with iOS. Also, if they're targeting tablets, the iPad owns over two-thirds of the market, and so that's where the most people are.
The PBS made a sound engineering decision IMHO. If you want to blame someone blame Google.
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So what's your answer? They shouldn't have any app at all? If they added an Android kickstarter campaign to their next funding drive, would *you* contribute?
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Of course they should not have an app. Use the goddamned web site! That is what we invented the web for! And we fought long and hard for web standards, so it works on any platform! But everyone wants to throw that away and have native apps for *every* *single* *site*, just so we can have more animations or whatever.
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Devaluing your future worth (Score:3)
I don't have ANY Apple or Android products and to start app development, I would have to purchase those devices and in the case of Apple, an Apple computer also. ($1500 total: iPad and MacMini with montor - more if using iMac or MacBook Pro) And I would have to use a credit card to finance it - got it? So I MUST break even!
Why MUST you break even right away?
If you realize the future of computing in most instances of mobile computing then suddenly you realize that tiny outlay is a small investment for massiv
Youtube? (Score:3)
So, rolling their own, with no experience then... (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer, they are a dime a dozen, and every two bit Newspaper, TV station, TV-Network, football team, Grocery Chain, Department store, and gossip site has an app. They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Stop hiring, and write a contract. Apps like these aren't that hard.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
Sounds like most of the people for whom I've done web projects. They always try to tell me what it should look like, what drop down menus they think they'll need, etc... but when you try to pin them down on specifics regarding what it actually should do, it turns out they haven't spent much time thinking about that.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design,
... and are trying to micromanage the interface. .
Most likely:
no
and yes
Sounds to me like designers talking. People who come from graphic design or ad-agencies and now do web design / interface design.
They usually want to micromanage the rendering. Because it has to look exactly as designed. Not just an interface with four buttons, but four buttons spaced in a perfectly pleasing way, perfect white space to text ratio, and please no substitute font! (Oh no, just the idea of that makes my black turtleneck crinkle.)
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This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices....
I read TFA and it sounds more like an MBA made the decision.
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Their kids site is almost entirely done in Flash. I assume they're comfortable with doing fixed-layout stuff - kinda like TV, I guess.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:5, Insightful)
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing, and programmer for more than 30 years. And I'm with him and not you. You don't know what you are talking about.
Sure it's easy to make a good desktop app with a arbitrarily resizable interface. And it's easy to make a poor mobile app with a arbitrarily resizable interface.
But the best mobile apps ARE designed for fixed size screens. That's because the screen size is small compared to the size of the minimum UI element (dictated by the size of a fingertip. Quite simply screen space is at a premium. Not only does the optimum specific arrangement of UI elements vary, the optimum UI hierarchy varies. Screen designs are best when a designer considers the specific sizes. Auto layout is a always a compromise, and one that gets worse the smaller the screens in question,
They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Apps like these aren't that hard.
The answer here is that your standards are low. That's why you think auto-layout is good enough. His opinion differs not because he knows less than you, but because his standards are higher.
Re:So, rolling their own, with no experience then. (Score:4, Insightful)
How I know you're bullshitting:
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing,
Apple IOS Development platform first release: February 2008.
Android Development Platform first release: August 2008.
Its 2013. You do the math.
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All that time, and still haven't learned to use the IDEs? No wonder multiple screen sized present such a challenge.
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so sad.
That was then, this is now. Its time to step up your game.
Did you dictate screen size to your desktop customers too?
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That was then, this is now. Its time to step up your game.
You want to pay my salary and front the company money for your experiments go ahead. We are in it to make money. There's very little profit in maintaining a bazillion variations. We don't have unlimited time or manpower.
Did you dictate screen size to your desktop customers too?
Um, we are talking about mobile devices. Mobile devices which still have a plethora of variations. And yes we dictate hardware requirements all the time for mobile devices. We don't run on ancient hardware for example. Other than making our own hardware, we have to do what is best. D
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This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
Their ipad app should already use Model View Controller. They just need to rewrite everything in Java, and incorporate a few android specific fixes. Easy!
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They pay their own salaries every year without fail. They have a 291 million dollar budget.
Non profit [wikipedia.org] means that there should be, and normally is nothing left after covering their costs and salaries, rent, plant, etc. You might want to read up on it.
It doesn't mean that their vendors don't get paid and everyone who works there works for free.
Support services make up 21% of their budget [npr.org].
No, I'm not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Android not as big as it appears (Score:2, Insightful)
Android is the biggest player today.
This is false from the standpoint of people writing apps other people will use.
Many Android phones are dirt cheap things not really suitable to run any applications on.
We already know iOS apps continue to pull in far more revenue... Android is growing but usual revenue is at least half as much.
PBS decision makers often show Apple products, they are Apple fans.
But then, so are most people.
That's the only reason why Android is being black listed.
Android is being supported t
Does every web site have to be an app? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jesus, give us a break. You can't go to a blog or any other site without being nagged to download their special app, usually via an annoying popup.
I understand their pain (Score:5, Insightful)
As an Android and iOS developer, it is tough to support all possible screen sizes, aspect ratios, hardware specs and versions of Android. Sometimes not having a newer version of Android(>= 4.0) you miss a lot of features that people come to expect and your code is riddle with backwards compatibility stuff just to support Gingerbread, or worse(ie: Donut).
Of course, it doesn't help that Google just made the Action Bar part of the backwards compatibility package, after all of this time not supporting it and saying just use the Sherlock library, which has it's own share of complications and headaches.
With videos it's even harder, my new phone only records in *.3gp files(for video, Razr Maxx HD), which means you have to have more transcoding on the backend to make it available to others.
And then you have the Note and Note 2 which are just mini-tablets and not really phone sized anymore. And the lack of support in Android(which iOS has btw) to figure out if you are on a phone or not, really hurts the user experience.
The cost is great, and the hassle is hard to justify, so with a fixed budget I am not surprised they aren't developing for it just yet.
And think even with the fragmentation going on the iOS land, they still only have like 5 screen sizes to worry about (in the tablet area), so you can really tweak the user-experience on each version of the iPad/iPad mini to make the most of the real estate and hardware. Plus they all share a common base with most of the features already there, so it makes it easier to program for, and less backwards-compatibility stuff in your code to mess with and support
Re:I understand their pain (Score:5, Insightful)
Weren't we all promised that back when Java was up and coming and how well did that work?
But, those like you that have done both (and myself) realize how much of a fricking pain Android is to develop on. You can even have the same exact phone with different carriers and experience different issues. I don't know why Google doesn't restrict the rights to license the Android name more, to only phones that implement the APIs exactly as they should on the phone.. It is an absolute pain to debug Android issues.
Writing Android Apps is a breeze, I enjoy it. It is an issue when you go to QA them that you run into issues...
So then the question is (Score:2)
How do you develop apps on computers? Those seem to be the ultimate of non-standard display sizes. You can find displays of anything from about 1024x768 up to about 2560x1600 on most modern systems, with anything in between. Lots of aspect ratios too, 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10, 21:9. Yet somehow lots, and lots and lots of developers seem to be able to make their stuff work. It can deal with the concept of repositioning elements, scaling UI (games in particular are often quite good at this) and relative position
It was also there... (Score:2)
I don't remember anyone saying that Java would solve screen resolution problems like this?
Actually it did try to address that with Swing and GridBagLayout...
3GP == MP4 (Score:2)
With videos it's even harder, my new phone only records in *.3gp files
Wikipedia says 3GP, 3G2, and MP4 are essentially the same thing as MOV (the ISO base media file format), and video can be ASP or AVC. Did you try just renaming it to .mov or .mp4? Or do you need to transcode because your camera records ASP and browsers expect AVC?
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As an Android and iOS developer, it is tough to support all possible screen sizes, aspect ratios, hardware specs and versions of Android. Sometimes not having a newer version of Android(>= 4.0) you miss a lot of features that people come to expect and your code is riddle with backwards compatibility stuff just to support Gingerbread, or worse(ie: Donut).
Of course, it doesn't help that Google just made the Action Bar part of the backwards compatibility package, after all of this time not supporting it and saying just use the Sherlock library, which has it's own share of complications and headaches.
With videos it's even harder, my new phone only records in *.3gp files(for video, Razr Maxx HD), which means you have to have more transcoding on the backend to make it available to others.
And then you have the Note and Note 2 which are just mini-tablets and not really phone sized anymore. And the lack of support in Android(which iOS has btw) to figure out if you are on a phone or not, really hurts the user experience.
The cost is great, and the hassle is hard to justify, so with a fixed budget I am not surprised they aren't developing for it just yet.
And think even with the fragmentation going on the iOS land, they still only have like 5 screen sizes to worry about (in the tablet area), so you can really tweak the user-experience on each version of the iPad/iPad mini to make the most of the real estate and hardware. Plus they all share a common base with most of the features already there, so it makes it easier to program for, and less backwards-compatibility stuff in your code to mess with and support
And yet, there are plenty of applications that work find on all possible devices.
There are people who spend most of their work time complaining and thinking why something can not be done, or why it is hard.
Then there are those who do it.
Re:I understand their pain (Score:5, Insightful)
As an Android and iOS developer, it is tough to support all possible screen sizes, aspect ratios, hardware specs and versions of Android. Sometimes not having a newer version of Android(>= 4.0) you miss a lot of features that people come to expect and your code is riddle with backwards compatibility stuff just to support Gingerbread, or worse(ie: Donut).
And none of this would be a problem if PBS would simply publish the specification for whatever JSON/XML/etc back end they are using to transmit information to the clients about shows and episodes, and use standard RFC-compatible video formats and streaming protocols with no DRM or other nonsense.
Why would it not be a problem? Because the next day the app stores would be full of "SparkleVideoPlayer now supports PBS!" updates for all of the existing streaming video apps and their loyal users. Or if my screen size, aspect ratio, blah, blah, blah is not supported, I can write my own app!
I can understand why the commercial TV outfits want to control everything - they think it's the only way to poison the experience with ads. But why are public broadcasters like PBS, BBC, and Australia's ABC doling the same thing? It's idiotic - the solution to "how do I support a million devices" is simple: "publish the spec so that the taxpaying public can write their own apps".
Legit, but part of the trade (Score:2)
Consider if you will (Score:2)
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That by pure volume, there are WAY more Android devices out there than IOS devices. So the PBS arguments are bovine effluent. Look, YouTube works fine on my Android phone. Why not PBS?
Maybe because Youtube is owned by Google, who also makes Android, so they have a huge vested interest in making it work NO MATTER WHAT. Also, Google makes more in profit in a single quarter than PBS generates in revenue for several years. Google has essentially limitless resources to work with. PBS is always cash-strapped.
Either you're trolling or you have little experience with the real world to ask that kind of question.
iIdiots (Score:3)
in the apple world, it's normal to tune for particular screen pixel-counts. in all of the rest of the world, mobile and not, from the mists of time forward, people simply treat screen size as a parameter. it's called "responsive", and all it means is that your app adjusts parametrically, so you don't have to customize it for every possible screen pixel dimension.
in otherwords, BOFH. PBS thinks it has competent computer people, but doesn't.
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Yeah with android it just some parameters that you need to adjust and everything works fine. You really don't have any real world experience with Android haven't you ?
I develop Android Apps as a part of my job (I don't even do the iOS ports) and there doesn't go a day by without being faced with some problems. Fragmentation, low quality dev tools, bugs ,
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in the apple world, it's normal to tune for particular screen pixel-count.
No, it's not. Auto-layout will use point (not pixel) values as offsets, but that's it. Aside from that, it does relative layout that reacts to screen size changes.
- An iOS Developer Who Actually Knows What He's Talking About
SOLUTION (Score:3)
Hire developers that provide solutions, not excuses.
3/4 the apps of the Kindle Fire apps I use suck... (Score:2)
...due to screen sizing problems. The typical problem is that the font size and touch-sensitive areas are far too small, and don't respond to the "pinch" gesture.
In almost ALL applications, text entry of more than a word or phrase is close to unusable the text-selection cursors are too small to manipulate accurately; if you don't type it perfectly the first time, seeing and backspacing every error as you type it, your ability to make a correction in the middle of a block of text is close to nil.
If you read
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Not uncommon (Score:2)
It's pretty simple. If you target iPad you have two form factors and retina/non-retina, though you can really just do retina and let it downscale if you want. There are only 2-3 CPU/GPU profiles. That covers over half the tablet market, depending on who's numbers you believe.
On Android, you have to target 20 different devices, maybe more, just to get the majority of Android tablets. If you want 90% then the list gets much longer.
So... (Score:2)
So if I wanted to make a PBS app for them, would PBS work with me? Give me access to their API? Their video streams? If not... why not? We're helping to pay for it, right?
They don't have time to make it "perfect" for everyone, but I can guarantee you enough of us nerds grew up on Mr. Rogers that we could find a sufficiently skilled team of volunteers to do it.
Why the hell do they they need an "app"? (Score:2)
The web is a flexible, universal and adaptable medium. Why the hell anyone would want an "app" solely to offer content that could just as easily (more easily, actually) be offered through a web browser is just needlessly jumping on the bandwagon.
I understand the why they might want to offload the graphics and UI to the system to reduce throughput and improve performance, but that's what AJAX and caching are supposed to be for, but they aren't always implemented correctly and almost nobody uses them properl
Cocos2d-x (Score:4, Interesting)
Using cocos2d-x as an example, I have little trouble programming away in C++ on my desktop at full speed, then checking to make sure that I haven't broken anything on iOS or android. By programming on my desktop I can change screen ratios and whatnot very quickly to make sure everything looks good. My code for iOS and Android has a minimal number of #ifdefs to tweek the very occasional platform specific bits. I love keeping things C++ as it is so wonderfully multi-platform while being able to access the finer bits of the various OSs. Only once have I even run into a tiny bit of trouble with endianness.
The real trick is to make sure that compiling in iOS and Android is kept as simple as possible. For example I keep the android part all command-line. I run a tiny script that compiles and installs the App while awaiting debug data. This then keeps me out of eclipse. The crazy thing is that if there are any android problems I don't even need to close my desktop IDE; just make the changes there and re-run the script.
The final deployment isn't that hard either. I don't presently even distribute desktop versions of the apps. Development is desktop based as it is just so much faster.
So I don't know what exactly the problem is. Personally I was looking into blasting out a Blackberry version of my latest app just to see how easy it would be. My suspicions are that getting any code running on the BB and then uploading it to the BB store will actually be the hardest bits.
Message me if you have any questions about this setup.
Ummm... (Score:2)
But iCrap devices now come in all different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and resolutions, with an array of different versions of iOS amongst them. So clearly someone is either talking out their ass or has taken a large donation from some guy named T. Cook.
Screen resizing is actually a big issue in Android (Score:2)
Former PBS Developer (Score:3, Interesting)
I spent a bit of time developing for PBS before I quit. It was awhile ago, but I had a few run-ins with them after that on a contractor level as well. Their IT department is incredibly dysfunctional and full of itself. Maybe things changed, but when I was there, it was run by English majors and such with no clue, and demoralizing job titles.
PBS has never really been good at keeping basic things in order, so expecting them to either design a great responsive web app or a native app is not really surprising. I really would not listen to anything they say as technical truth. It's a really ugly, bad culture there in IT and they are in no place to talk about anything as a technical authority.
How come everybody else can create Android apps? (Score:3)
Why is it that only PBS has such terrible trouble?
Re:Back up... Why would PBS write an app? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would PBS write an app? Not trying to be snarky, I just have no idea why a producer of TV programming would make one. Is it for showing TV schedules?
It's an app. You've got to write apps.
Just like, a few years ago, you had to replace local applications with web pages because everything was going to 'web apps'. Fads come, fads go.
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Except that websites tends to require more local system resources than their "native" equivalents while getting less done.
Facebook and YouTube wouldn't suck nearly as much if they provided a C/C++ client application that used native OS interface elements and used system-installed codecs for decoding video, and used little if any web content to put things on screen at all. If they need to do fancy stuff like with CSS, Windows has had this wonderful thing called "GDI" since 1985; no need to make web interfac
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You can write a useful android app just using html 5 & javascript. And that removes the need to worry about ascpect ratios as well.
Facebook tried that on iOS. Google around to find out how much THAT blew chunks.
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It was better than using their website on your phone. I still think you could make it work, especially since today's phones have more memory so it wouldn't crash as much. I don't know why Javascript doesn't have any way to deallocate memory manually, maybe they don't want you to be able to tell the good developers from the bad?
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schedules, videos-- both previews and full programs.
Re:Back up... Why would PBS write an app? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, nonsense. I've been watching PBS shows online for what, eight years now? The quality of their programs are top notch.
If you watch, for instance, a recent episode of Nature, there will be a quick 15 second ad at the beginning, and another 15 second ad somewhere around the halfway point. That's it. That's a hell of a deal considering the amount of ads that are played on Hulu (a paid-for service) dwarf what are shown on PBS, and they're all for Viagra to boot.
Does PBS nag a little bit sometimes to try and persuade users to donate? Sure, of course they do, but the best persuasion is the quality of their programming. Frontline, Nova, and Nature are probably three of the best programs in the world.
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Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:5, Interesting)
It definitely requires more man hours to visually verify things "look like they should" and this is very real with 50+ configurations of OS/screen size.
yes but they shouldn't need to - after 3 it becomes irrelevant if the number is 30, 50 or 2000. their mobile webview certainly isn't tested on 1000 screens - their web version certainly isn't tested on all screen sizes and resolutions(let's just say 20 possible screen sizes and 20 possible different resolutions and 30 possible viewing distances .. you should get the point, you just don't design things in pixel perfect fashion).
it's more of a problem of wanting it too perfect or having designers unable to think in flexible terms - as if they were designing a desktop app with a scaleable window. btw those ui designers are rapidly becoming useless on apple as well, but maybe they'll have few years still on windows phone(why do you think ios7 is flat design and no longer imitations of things draw for that single screen size.. flat design is easier to make flexible, so they went with that, same with metros just text elements floating around style..)...
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You've nailed it. All I can say is that ...
you should get the point, you just don't design things in pixel perfect fashion
... this part should be bold as well!
(And printed on t-shirts, bumper stickers, captioned on pictures of funny cats, etc.)
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:5, Interesting)
UI design needs to have every element scalable by percentage.
Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
Then the same application that runs on my Android phone can also run on my Windows/Linux laptop/desktop.
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
That's a really stupid design concept.
Ideally, on touchscreen devices:
- The right size for buttons is about the size of my finger (Which is fairly constant for most humans)
- The right location for buttons is where my finger can reach it easily. (Again, fairly constant for most humans)
- The right size for text is so it's readable. (That can be quite variable for many humans, and also depend on screen resolution and technology)
If I have a bigger screen, I want to display more information, rather than display the same amount of information in a bigger text.
Also if the designer is really dumb and scale everything to full screen, then aspect ratio is messed up and the pictures look weird
Web sites are sometime hard to use on phones because it's hard to click on links, which are buttons the same size as text. My eyes have better definition than my finger. Phone apps that are not optimized for tablets are wasting the tablet potential.
Running an phone app on a desktop machine is usually a terrible experience.
Apple didnt solve that problem any more than Android, they just have less of it. But they do have that same problem for iPad vs iPad mini. Some apps are harder to use on mini because buttons and texts were sized for the big ipads.
Websites can usually achieve useful compromises.
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. It reminds me of the times when there were websites displaying in 640x480 no matter the resolutrion of your screen. Some designers apparently feel excruciating physical pain at the thought that one viewer in podunk might see a single pixel rendered off by 1.
The same people insist on hyper expensive calibrated lights, monitors, paper, and ink to get the colors just right on a flyer even though the readers will be in widely varying light wearing a variety of tinted glasses with completely unknown backgrounds.
They simply don't get relative layouts or the concept that the viewer is supposed to control the presentation.
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work with one of these people. I liked him a lot. But he came from the advertising world and from printed media. He was used (years of experience) to being able to start a project with a SIZE.
So the first thing he did on any web project was define a box of a fixed size, and float it in the middle of the page. Change the page size all you liked, the content stayed the same size.
Then he nailed down all the fonts so you couldn't adjust them. He used pictures for text all over the place, because they looked exactly like the fonts he was using, so there was no difference. You wouldn't change the font yourself, right? You'd never know.
And you see this all the time, on the web. Not sure if all the culprits come from print media, but they seem to have that same urge: Control the experience. Completely. Utterly ignore the fact that people have bigger and smaller screens, disabilities which cause them to prefer different font sizes or colors, etc.
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I will say that this also comes from many, many users, who will consistently rate a page that has everything tuned to perfection as "more professional" and thus more trustworthy.
It's not just stupid designers. There really is a customer-experience trade-off that is valued by the customers, as long as they have exactly the right screen size. It's one of the disadvantages that Android lives with. The flexibility means that it's not practical to offer the same customer experience that people find on the iDe
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They don't want a repeat of the PBS Kids Super Why app debacle, where they had inexperienced developers design a very static ui which really didn't scale at all. The app worked on a single device on android 2.2
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beancreative.superwhy.android [google.com]
Re:Mobile apps and screen sizes, legit problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that mobile computing finally found success in iOS and its copy-cats due to the thoughtful simplification of the UI/UX. Desktops are by nature a different beast, and 15 years of translating the desktop UX to the tablet/mobile was a failure until Apple re-designed what mobile UX should be in the first iPhone.
Your thinking is clearly a programmers view, not an end-users. Which is why you, and most programmers, desperately need UX designer help on your projects.
I just bought a Nexus 7 2nd gen off the internet. I was blown away how little Google understands good UX/UI, and the need of the OS to be user-centric in allocating resources. The device while sporting very fast a quad core 1.5 Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM, has the slowest user response I've ever seen. It was 4-8 times slower at responding to user touch, and in UI transitions the a 2 year old iPad2, despite having 3-4 times the hardware resources! I had to drop the idea of supporting Android in our app, because I can't even get acceptable behavior on Google's own super-tablet.
This type of thinking, that has programmers worrying about geeky things like what kind of multi-tasking they have or whether they can root the device, has kept Android from focusing on what is #1 importance: the user. And while I have no doubt the Android will take the majority of the marketshare with poor-performing low-cost devices and Google and Amazon selling quality hardware below cost because they have ulterior motives... in the end the market will suffer because Android is being driven primarily by least common denominator market politics and a programmer-centric point of view.
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I think PBS needs to define a standard user with standard sized hands and beedy little eyes to use their tablet application since they use such meticulate placement of widgets.
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... Perhaps you could read the summary, and then maybe the article. They articulated a very specific and valid reason. You may put different value on how important what they said is, but that doesn't make it any less true.
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Yep ... thats how you do it ... except you left out the part they were complaining about ... having to tweak it for god knows how many devices of different sizes to make it so that its done properly rather than 'almost'.
Thats the thing they are complaining about. They don't want to be the typical android app, where everything is 'almost' as good as it is on the iStuff.
Re:The ipad app is superb? (Score:2, Flamebait)
The iPad app is crap.
It's missing the obvious, trivial user interface items like last broadcast date on shows that make finding new content other than the featured content REALLY painful. It's eye-candy heavy and usability light. The video player (the absolute core of the thing, really) has always crashed on my iPad, even though they've clearly changed their core player software (from one crashing system to another).
They should be making a much simpler, rock solid app. It's their fear of their eye-candy
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PBS for iPad [apple.com] is 4.5 stars, based on 24,231 ratings.