

Google Kills Android Menu Button, Replaces It with Action Bar - diwank
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399437,00.asp

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tomjen3
Damm that is annoying. I really liked the dedicated hardware button and
considered it a great improvement over IOS.

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steve-howard
In the last two phones I've owned they're not even hardware buttons any more,
just special backlit icons below the screen that react exactly like the
touchscreen above it. Which I don't like, but eh, designers love taking shit
out of products these days.

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masklinn
> In the last two phones I've owned they're not even hardware buttons any more

They're "hardware" buttons in that they're hard-set in the hardware, but
capacitive. The Galaxy Nexus has done away with even "hardware" buttons, the
three black-on-white keys at the bottom are OS soft-keys and displayed on the
screen, they're not even a separate and hard-wired area anymore.

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steve-howard
That's true, though the difference doesn't matter to me that much as a user.

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fufulabs
This is why you should avoid developing for the Android for at least 6 more
months. It has been too liquid and fragmented so far. The yield for your
effort is not very optimal.

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napoleoncomplex
I would argue that now is the perfect time to start developing for Android, if
for some reason you aren't doing it yet. The recently published design
guidelines from Google are clear and lay a good foundation for anyone who has
struggled with figuring out how to develop and design for the OS, and also
show that Google finally "gets" where their platform has been lacking so far.

The Action bar, although in a limited manner, can also be implemented in older
versions of Android, so from a coding perspective, there's nothing terribly
scary about it.

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soupysoupysoup
When the poorly coded app freezes, the Android menu buttons are often the only
escape. This _was_ an advantage in my opinion.

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cletus
I'm actually surprised by this. I've never liked the extra hardware buttons:
they're in different orders on different phones, developers use them
inconsistently and (IMHO) they lead to an inconsistent experience (eg in a
browser you press the "back" hardware button to go back but a "soft" button to
go forwards). Oh and discovery is more difficult (eg compare the iOS Settings
app vs Menu -> Settings).

That all being said, I see ICS as a watershed moment for Android. I personally
still prefer iOS but with ICS (at least with the native Google experience
rather than the crapware layers most handset makers put over it) I think it's
reached a point where I think it's a reasonable choice for, say, (non-techie)
friends and family.

This all reminds me of the mouse a little. The Mac famously persevered with
one buttons but the Windows two button mouse clearly won (even OSX has context
menus). Even so, I have a hard time explaining to people about right-clicking
so it's problematic. On iOS at least I think the single button is just fine,
even preferable, and certainly far easier to understand and more consistent.

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bane
_On iOS at least I think the single button is just fine, even preferable, and
certainly far easier to understand and more consistent._

I don't disagree that the right mouse button can take new users a while to
come to grips with.

The trade off of course is that even in moderately complex tools, a single
button can't provide all of the actions a user would likely want to do. In the
Mac world this was historically resolved by burying functions under layers of
unmemorable keyboard combinations...e.g. command+shift+t or some such or in
menus in the menu bar.

So the question then becomes, who do you optimize your interface for? The new
user that can barely understand the abstraction of moving a physical device
that's loosely mapped to screen coordinates? Or the user that needs to get-
stuff-done-and-after-all-won't-be-a-new-user-all-that-long.

I personally think this move away from the menu button in Android land is a
mistake. I already have issues with it on my Tab. With the software button
showing up all over the screen or not at all.

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rsanchez1
This is Matthias Duarte at work. A "bar" has been present in webOS since the
beginning. In 1.x and 2.x, you could press the app name or swipe down from the
top of the screen to view the app's menu or other options like Cut n Paste,
logging in or out, etc. In 3.x, the top bar was expanded to include
notifications and dashboards, greatly improving multitasking. In all three
versions, the top bar also had quick access to system settings (again with a
tap or a swipe down) such as WiFi, Bluetooth, VPN, or airplane mode.

Such a shame that Palm/HP let Duarte go. He's really bringing the best of
webOS to Android. The classic webOS experience (which was a little muddled up
with the Touchpad) only had buttons for power and volume. Everything else was
done tapping or swiping on the screen or gesture area. Now, Duarte is doing
away with hardware buttons on Android and who knows, maybe a gesture area is
next.

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diwank
Duarte's work at Android as Director has been really impressive. Honeycomb was
the first major release with an element of his design influence.

Besides, I really loved Web OS UI. It was built for user-friendliness from the
ground up and brought some very bold design decisions to the table. It sadly
never took off.

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foobarbazetc
If only we could go back in time and eliminate all of the Android phones which
have a menu button and/or are not running ICS.

Oh. Wait. That's like 99.999% of all Android phones.

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phanster
Exactly this. As an android developer, I'll developer my applications for the
broadest range of devices that I can support. I know eventually ICS will take
off, but for now 80% of the market is >= 2.2.

This is just another wrench thrown into the cog of advancing Android
development. They pretty much have to break all their conventions before
moving forward which is a pain in the ass to work through.

Also, if Google actually cared about it's developers, wouldn't it make sense
for them to back this decision up with an official library to support an
action bar on other OSs? There's third party libraries that you can use but it
just goes to show again that Google just doesn't really care which state their
developers are in.

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spiralpolitik
The hardware buttons were one of the worst aspects of the Android experience
and its good that their are finally going away. It's a shame that given the
fragmentation and poor upgrade paths it will be at least a year before there
is sufficient usage of ICS for developers to consider spending the time to
implement for it.

Although I've read about poor UX experience with the action bar in that its
too close to the space bar so you often end up hitting the soft buttons
accidentally when typing 'space'.

