Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo!
The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful.
And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone app instead of unlocking the phone is becoming obscene. I often have my phone landscape while using it as a mini-tablet and in that orientation it's easy to do. Perhaps I'm paranoid but I think the screen now locks faster than it used to and I haven't been able to find the setting to slow it down yet, which exacerbates the problem, when you're lounging and intermittently transferring your attention between tv and internet browsing.
And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day.
The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward. Auto-brightness has been got rid of so often you're constantly fighting the brightness of your phone at night.
The new notification have to be double tapped, which again is awkward, especially as they register the first tap and then "helpfully" tell you to make a 2nd one. But the first tap is behind a button press of the lock screen so it's actually a triple press.
I'm also slightly perplexed as to the home button icon change, to a circle of all things. It actually offends me a bit, it's so tiny and yet completely devoid of meaning. It's different for Apple's circle button as that was a real button, Google's tiny circle just kinda floats there. And the "back" triangle changes orientation for no discernible reason other than the designer obviously wanted to animate something.
The new phone app is strange, the buttons are too small, the volume of the button presses doesn't turn down as you turn down the speaker volume.
And this is in a day and a half of use. It honestly feels like anyone testing it would have hit most of these issues. I suspect Google's designers then turned round to the testers and said "As designed. Material, you know. It's just a new way", rather than admit they'd screwed up.
The worst part is, it's not added anything. I've not come across a single thing yet that I've gone, oh, cool! Not one.
I'm pretty pleased with lollipop. Some of your complaints may be down to personal choice, but not all. For example, the triangle animation changes from pointing left when the action would be 'back', to down when the action is 'down', as in hiding the keyboard.
Some other thoughts:
- Getting to settings is no different from before when I had to swipe down and then tap a button to see the settings button. Now it's two swipes instead.
- Try schedule view in calendar for the overview you're looking for.
- The double tap on notifications to open them I like because it means I won't accidentally open one.
Things I've said 'oh, cool!' to:
- Guest accounts
- Brightness slider in the swipe down
- Priority/None interruption settings for the ringer. I used to use Shush! but this works nicely and with more configuration options, albeit less granular timing.
- Lock rotation in the swipe down settings
- Flashlight in the swipe down settings
Lollipop arrived on my Nexus 5 last week, and I couldn't be happier. Battery life is significantly longer, and the new UI ... ugh, this sounds almost cloying ... the new UI makes me happy, it gives me joy.
It's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's functional, it's natural. What more could you want?
I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel. To bring this experience to the unwashed masses of Android users is a very good thing.
You can change the view to give you a summary of all the events for each month... You click the top right menu button, and select 'schedule' instead of 'day' or '5 day'.
That's not even close to a month at a glance, that's a lengthy list of hour long intervals. If you had as much scheduled as I do you would see how worthless this view is. I'm in a meeting and my boss asked me when something is free for next week and I'm scrolling and swiping around looking pretty much incompetent while the client is on the phone.
I had an iPhone, switched to Nexus 5. Nexus 5 already produced joy in me, it really is a great phone and as an ex-iPhoner I really think Android is prime time now and almost as good as iOS (my only issue is that some of the built in apps are a bit rubbish and Google Hangouts, the default, sucks as an SMS program).
But I'm getting no joy from Lollipop. Apart from all the interface issues I've hit, it seems fairly bug ridden.Some notification sounds suddenly turned themselves on (GMail), other sounds are really loud. Another example right now the lock screen on mine is showing a picture of a video I cast on BubbleuPNP last night. For absolutely no reason. I can't stop it.
That's totally not cool. I don't want a blurry video still as my lock screen picture. How do I clear it? Is that intentional? Or a bug?
Probably some setting you chose. When I first booted up Android 5, it asked me whether or not to display notifications on the lock page (I chose no). It could be that you chose yes and your app (BubbleuPNP) keeps pushing that video to your lock screen...
> I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel.
iOS is colourful and whatnot, but it's confusing as hell and has some ridiculous defaults. Ever since KitKat Android has been better by a wide margin. Not to mention, Apple sucks at services, whereas Google excels at them - and that's half the functionality of a phone these days. And Google Now is pretty much the best thing ever...
But yes, the new design of Android 5 makes me happy too - everything looks so much more vibrant, colourful, sleek and streamlined, etc... It's so much more Google-ey.
Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events'.
This = install aCalendar[1] and Simple Calendar Widget [2]
Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app? I don't want a profile pic so I don't know which account is which of the 5 I need to use, so I just pick pot luck or swipe through them all? Then there is that annoying hover button. 'WRITE SOMETHING' it screams out at you, 'Surely that's why you're here isn't it? You couldn't possibly just want to scroll through your inbox without accidentally tapping me!!!'
This = install K9 mail.[3]
YouTube - Enter menu drawer, close it, press 'back' > still takes me back to the home screen. Take a leaf out of Feedly's book and open the frickin' menu drawer!
Chrome - Thankfully you can stop the annoying tab merge pretty easily.
Notifications - now to get to settings I have to do three actions, two pull downs and hit a teeny tiny little button, or you know, waste a space on the home screen.
Phone dialer - I actually like it. It's way faster to get to you contacts and has a much better layout than before. Still got that annoying floating button - 'DIAL SOME NUMBERS ASSHOLE!!!'
Default keyboard - why is removing the key separators a good idea? Is there some data to back that up? To me it looks like a cluttered mess. Thankfully switching back to the old style is just a setting away, but it would be great if there was a more sane default.
You can actually reskin the keyboard back to the old look.
Click the unlock button, swipe up on your phone, not left or right, pull down on your phone twice, click the settings button, ignore the randomly flashing menu items as you scroll down, find "language and input", click "Google Keyboard" (not "Current Keyboard"), click "Appearance and Layouts", click "Theme", click "Holo White".
The way you wrote this makes it seem like swiping up instead of left or right is really horrible and confusing. Why? Previous versions of Android had a totally different lock screen design, so I honestly do not know why you feel so confident that the correct swiping direction should be left or right. Because Apple did it that way?
The problem is that if you swipe left it will open the dialer, right photo. Only up unlocks it.
While it's useful having shortcuts to do these things, they've gone far too far and made it too hard to do what you most often want to do, which is simply unlock the phone. The old photo button worked well, for example.
They had also previously used "up" on the lock screen for voice commands/google now, so I for one have learnt never to use "up" unless I want to set a timer using voice (pretty much the only useful thing it can do).
I still don't see how that's bad. My current lock screen, a custom one, only unlocks if I swipe right. Not up, not down, not left. Swiping left would open the camera. There's no easy way for me to get to the dialer straight from my current lock screen. From the way you describe it, Lollipop's lock screen sounds great to me. Full notification list, the ability to interact with the notifications, the ability with a single swipe to either get to the camera, the dialer, or just unlock the phone... sounds great to me. I'm not trying to be facetious, just to be clear. It sounds like by far the most useful lock screen Android has ever had by default.
Also, for what it's worth, I find swiping up to be easier to do one-handed on large phones.
The issue is the previous lock screen didn't require any swipes to enter your unlock pattern. They added a step, making the most common gesture slower than it was before.
Ahh, I see. I guess I wouldn't notice that since I'm so used to already having notifications shown first on the lock screen. I can see how that'd be annoying if you don't care about the notifications list.
That's a very general statement which hasn't been customized at all to the current scenario. So really there's no way for me to respond, but I'll try.
As I said, swiping up actually feels easier to me on a large screen than swiping left or right. And putting notifications on the lock screen is a critical feature in my opinion, something Android has desperately needed out of the box for a while now. I use a custom lock screen just for that feature because it's so useful.
The notifications are a great addition in stock usefulness. You could always add that functionality through 3rd party lock screens but it's nice to see it baked right in.
It's the swiping that I'm specifically disliking. Every time I swipe to the right it opens up the phone app. Probably there are many users who have formed a really strong habit of swiping a certain way to unlock their Android phone. I would bet on that direction being left-to-right.
Do you know if it's possible to change the way the lock screen handles swiping in some settings page somewhere?
>why is removing the key separators a good idea? //
I've a suggestion for this one - key separators support a paradigm of key presses, following the [traditional] keyboard metaphor. However with swipe-able keyboards it doesn't really make sense, you only need to approximate the position of the letter during your swipe - no "barriers" helps to enforce that new paradigm. If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board).
What fraction of the words you type are not in the dictionary? Why not revert to tap-typing for just those words and use the faster method for the dictionary words?
Depending on the region, it can be common enough to be annoying. Your second point would be the reason why id just not start swipping, if I need to stop in order to type, id rather just keep typing. Typing is more natural from being used to the keyboard anyway
> If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board).
reply
Do most people swipe? I honestly have no idea, and I'm not an Android user. I'm wondering if there are any stats on that. Particularly for older or less techno-phile users, swiping keyboards might be difficult to get into using.
I swipe heavily (using the original 'swype' app). It's still much faster than the others, and I've tried almost all of them, including the Google keyboard. Also, everyone else who sees me typing using that tries to learn the same. It's really more convenient than traditional touch typing.
A large fraction of Android users around me use one of the swype type keyboards... but that could be because I've been evangelizing it for close to 5 years now to anybody who'll listen... it really is a genuinely better and faster way to input on the mobile.
Swipe typing on a touch screen [1] is analogous to T9 [2] text entry on a traditional keypad. In fact, they were invented by the same group [3].
On numeric keypads, each button corresponds to ~3 letters. Basic text entry involves pushing each button multiple times to select the index of the letter you want[4], then waiting to confirm the selection before moving to the next character.
T9 sped up this process by allowing you to press each button once. It would determine which word you meant by comparing all possible combinations of letters that could be created from the buttons you pressed against a dictionary of known words.
Swype provides a similar extension to QWERTY touchscreen keyboards. With Swype, you drag your finger across a QWERTY grid, creating a path. This path starts on the first letter of the intended word and crosses all letters in the word, in order. It also crosses lots of letters that aren't in the word, or are out of position. The 'secret sauce' lies in how to compare the ordered set of keys defined by the path to a predefined dictionary and produce a meaningful prediction of the intended word.
I haven't implemented such an algorithm myself. However, you can imagine how it might be done. For example, acute angles in the path probably occur when you reach a letter you want, then angle off to collect the next letter. This provides a signpost that can be combined with the initial letter to reduce the possible words down to the set that starts with the initial letter and includes the key with the acute angle.
Because it's got a big list of n-grams and knows what words are more commonly used than others. It uses a predictive model to generate a list of words from your swipe, and then sorts that according to usage. It also continuously learns what words you use the most and prioritizes those. It picks the most likely word, but also displays a list of other possibilities you can tap. It's pretty slick.
> It's a bizarre method of text entry, but interesting nonetheless.
And by bizarre you mean fantastic... It's even better in a language like French, where swiping means not having to type in the accents, whereas normally you'd have to do a long press of the letter and then select the accent you want...
You don't need to type spaces either and keyboards can be more compact as it's about the word shape rather than hitting a particular letter sequence exactly. Stock Android 4.1 version at least seems pretty forgiving provided I hit the correct first letter, a lot of weight in the algo appears to lie with first letter.
I like the new keyboard. I feel like my typing mistakes have been reduced. Earlier i felt like i need to be precise on clicking the buttons now without boundary i don't need to.
I like everything about the new UI except for that Gmail profile switching. But you can easily switch from menu so no problem. Now OS X Yosemite those changes are annoying me and also slowing down my macbook pro. I had to disable few settings to get a acceptable performance.
Edit: There is one particular annoying thing in L. Sometimes when click on a tab like in Chrome, the notification window gets the touch and is semi shown.
I think the account switching in gmail is the single most annoying issue I've come across in lollipop. Most of the other changes are a matter of taste, the account switching in gmail is just plain bad. I have 5 accounts and can't even see all the "icon" versions at the same time... make the dropdown more distinctive and nuke the icons imho. I feel much the same about the icons in the message list too.
I wouldn't mind if the desktop/web interface were a bit more like the tablet sized gmail though... also if gmail proper could also see my other email accounts this way since there's no proper mail client in chromeos.
Thanks for the calendar recommendation. Ugh. Already switch to City Mapper from Google Maps when Google stripped that app. Sad to see the rest of the apps going the same way now.
> Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app?
The gmail redesign is really jarring if you're still on KitKat. It "fits" visually with the design language of Lolipop, but it still feels like a major step backward in terms of usability.
The conspiracy theorist in me is inclined to conclude that they do not, in fact, use their own app; it's almost like they made the Gmail app worse to encourage people to migrate to Inbox.
Clock - I used to be able to dismiss my 7:30 wakeup alarm if I woke up at 7:20 by simply swiping away the notification. But now I can't find any way to suppress the next instance of a recurring alarm.
So-called hamburger menus. New Relic has oh so helpfully moved everything useful into a hamburger menu it took ages to find (it even turns into a picture of a hamburger bun when you hover), while useless trivial distinctions get giant, labeled dropdown menus. The affordances are all backward. But I bet everybody clicking around looking for the features they used to use showed more "engagement" with the site, right?
Can you? Oh, thank god! Actually, now doing that, that reminds me of another two WTFs?
The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing...
And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicator looks. It changes shape depending where your finger is pulling from, why? I keep thinking something's gone wrong because this uneven blob suddenly appears on the top of your screen.
The first thing chrome said is that tabs show in the task switcher. And that you can disable this in the settings. Then it placed a settings link right under the text to turn it off first-thing.
Personally, I think people just don't like change. A lot of the things — camera shutter sound, out of bounds scrolling — they're not actual complaints. They sound more like "this is different and I'm not used to it". OTOH, some are definitely valid.
I wonder if there's any easy way to roll out design changes for the masses which doesn't cause uproar. I swear this happens every single time.
It's kinda weird, does take some getting used to. I think the new buttons at the bottom (home, back, menu) are so ugly. I didn't think the needed changing, but I'm not in charge of UX, so..
I have a spare phone so I decided to throw lollipop on it. Wow, I couldn't believe how much I hated it, and I'm not one of those never-upgrade-it-because-I-don't-like-change folks.
On 4.4.4, I've been hating the new calendar. Christ I hate the colors in agenda mode. They make it almost impossible for me to "see" the text without extreme concentration.
The first time I became familiar with the constant-change-is-bad meme is with Quicken. They would force you to upgrade every 3 years (or so, I may have the number wrong), and for a while I upgraded every year. Nothing changed from year to year except everything was in a different place and they added more bugs. I finally moved to Moneydance a couple of years ago and have been in financial software heaven ever since. One of their selling points was "we don't change shit around for no reason!"
FWIW I like what they did with maps, finally. I hated the design they came out with about a year ago or so. It was awful and I basically stopped using the app except when absolutely necessary because I always felt like a dumb idiot trying to use it. Nothing was discoverable. I never got used to it. Much better now.
Part of this, is that even if you come up with a design that is better than what you have, it ought to be a lot better, because you're also asking people to get used to a new design. If it's just incrementally better, you're going to piss people off because you're asking them to relearn how to do something again, for no apparent good reason. I don't think it's unreasonable for a person to be annoyed by that.
And of course, if it's worse, or if it's only arguably better, or if opinions are very much mixed, then you failed.
This is something Google doesn't seem to know institutionally, or rather I guess they just don't care. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Microsoft, who care about this too much.
I have the opposite experience. I liked the maps that came with my phone a year and a half ago.
It keeps getting upgraded. I lost the zoom buttons (pinch to zoom is very dangerous when driving, so basically a major feature loss for me). And recently the whole thing goes so slowly on my older phone that I have usually found the destination before the phone has managed to load the screen.
Recently I founds that I can uninstall all the updates, and I am back to the basic version that came with the phone. Far nicer. Less screen space, and search history is not as integrated, but at least it is usable in real time. If only I could go froward by two or three updates, then there is probably a version that did everything I want.
Well thats pretty much what the article boils down to. How am I expected to know that. The interface changed, the buttons were gone. And only now do I find out about a gesture to do the same thing.
Auto Brightness has been renamed and is available at Settings > Display > Adaptive Brightness. It just has to be turned on.
And I know it's personal preference but I love the way chrome tabs are integrated into the app switcher. It allows me to focus on what I'm doing and not so much what app I'm in. Now each tab is like an app in and of itself. I think that's the way multi-tasking should be done.
My personal favorite pointless change is the clock app. Now, mind you, it looks exactly the same if you disregard that they changed the widgets design, but thats system wide.
But they did manage to move the bin for deleting an alarm from the right to the left. That's all. Let's just switch it the fuck around!
You probably mean schedule, and no it doesn't as it shows only 6 or so items per page and isn't good for glancing at. I can't glance at it and see I've a meeting in the morning, I've got to read it to see when the appointments are. There's a reason the old paper calendars work so well, cause you can just glance at them.
The old calendar also had a week view where you could see most of the week and what was on. Now you're constantly having to scroll.
As for the rest, how can you debunk what actually happens? If you don't have your lollipop device on you, that probably means it's not a phone...
Yup, agenda view is great for a full day.
Settings in Chrome turns off the tab integration.
On the lock screen you can slide up from anywhere on the screen (which then takes me to the slide code screen).
The rest of the stuff - I guess some personal preference comes into it? But I'm thoroughly enjoying 5.0. Made a few tweaks to the default settings and it's great. Feels soooo much faster.
Well, the new calendar app is ridiculously bad. You can't get back the old "normal" calender view, lots of screen space is wasted in every window and the 1-month overview now is totally useless without any indicators.
Compared to that, the new Gmail and Maps apps are almost good...
The lock screen is indeed infuriating! Does anyone know if there's a way to restore the old behavior where you could enter your pattern lock immediately after pressing the power button?
The extra swipe serves no purpose at all, given that I've already pressed the power button, and have a pattern lock.
I don't agree. Users understand a browser, and that it contains tabs. I'm sure people will get used to the new way, probably, but it's not something that was in need of innovation. It was well understood.
The new behavior is surprising to people who have used any phone browser before, and it will continue to be surprising to people who use their desktop browsers as a point of reference.
Most casual users (family, non-tech saavy people) that I've seen don't even use the task switch button. They go to the home screen and then open whatever app they want, even if it ought to be in the task list already most of the time.
You can turn off the 'feature' of having Chrome tabs appear in the Android app switcher in the Settings. I too think that for power users especially, this is a bad idea. Maybe if they just had like the 5 most recent tabs...just maybe.
The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful.
And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone app instead of unlocking the phone is becoming obscene. I often have my phone landscape while using it as a mini-tablet and in that orientation it's easy to do. Perhaps I'm paranoid but I think the screen now locks faster than it used to and I haven't been able to find the setting to slow it down yet, which exacerbates the problem, when you're lounging and intermittently transferring your attention between tv and internet browsing.
And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day.
The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward. Auto-brightness has been got rid of so often you're constantly fighting the brightness of your phone at night.
The new notification have to be double tapped, which again is awkward, especially as they register the first tap and then "helpfully" tell you to make a 2nd one. But the first tap is behind a button press of the lock screen so it's actually a triple press.
I'm also slightly perplexed as to the home button icon change, to a circle of all things. It actually offends me a bit, it's so tiny and yet completely devoid of meaning. It's different for Apple's circle button as that was a real button, Google's tiny circle just kinda floats there. And the "back" triangle changes orientation for no discernible reason other than the designer obviously wanted to animate something.
The new phone app is strange, the buttons are too small, the volume of the button presses doesn't turn down as you turn down the speaker volume.
And this is in a day and a half of use. It honestly feels like anyone testing it would have hit most of these issues. I suspect Google's designers then turned round to the testers and said "As designed. Material, you know. It's just a new way", rather than admit they'd screwed up.
The worst part is, it's not added anything. I've not come across a single thing yet that I've gone, oh, cool! Not one.