10
May
Untitled-1

Finally, Google Has Come Up With A Predictable, Intuitive Sidebar Navigation Design - Now Please Add It To Everything [Update: Confirmed By Googlers!]

Posted by in Design, News

What exactly is the deal with slide-out sidebar navigation? Is it a standard Holo thing? Is it not? 3rd-party developers aren't really sure what to do with it, and even Google-made apps are all over the place. Some apps have sidebar navigation, some don't. The ones that do have it all function a little differently and none of the implementations were actually any good - until now.

Google Earth and Google Shopper were just updated with a new sidebar design, and, well, have you seen them? Google has fixed the biggest problem I have with all the previous designs: unpredictability.

In order to understand what's so great about the new design, we have to talk about what's so crappy about the old designs.

15
Feb
Jelly-Bean-Logo

Getting To Know Android 4.2.2 - Many Extremely Tiny Changes, And An Android@Home Sighting!

Posted by in Features, Getting To Know Android, Jelly Bean 4.2, News

Android 4.2.2 is out, which means it's time for another edition of Getting To Know Android, the series where I impress/frighten everyone with my borderline-mental-disorder powers of observation. Fair warning: These are going to be very minor changes. If Google moved a pixel, you're going to hear about it.

We already covered the big stuff like the ADB whitelist, the new download notification, Quick Settings toggles, and sounds, so we'll skip those for this article.

As usual for GTKA, the old version, 4.2.1, is on the left, and the new version, 4.2.2, is on the right. This edition promises to be pretty screenshot-heavy, so I hope your internet connection is feeling up to it.