AndroidHacker

I get these weird gig requests...

Someone wants t rescue an android application project, but they want someone to hurry up decide before seeing nay of the code mess..

Like really someone as a rational android developer is going to step into a mess without doing code pre-audit to see how mess it is?

Its nice, now I am getting all the lying recruiters who cannot get their temp gigs filled an want to cliam relocation benefits...

Mobile Touch is a muted-channel. What is a muted channel? its a sense chnnel that is or has been dampended as our technoogy has not produced mobile phones yet that can replay the same senses of tactile texture touch and smell.

So we use certain visual cues such as iconization and making user controls lok like life items so that we can evoke in the user a replay of those emotions using the visual channel to replace the emotiions that get replayed with the missing channel information.

This is why its so aggravating when I see a fantastic Ui like tumlbr in the mobile space and than crap-tastic Ui in the mobile touch space such as their android client.

Android like iphone does have some pain points to get that outstnading mobile application UI. in iOS its the pain of doing programmatically dervied UIs. In android its doing xml-lized UIS as its not set-up from the designer persepctie and you have to over write a huge amount of xml to get that fantastic mobile UI. But if you take the pain upfront nd compose your UI libraries to handle that pain, the path gets easier and the painless.

Which makes even more perverse in mobile UI interviews and applications for positions that recruiers and hr managers are not looking at the obvious of what UI libraries have been developed and why. They instead punt and look at what someone did as a one-off.

Well you as a company want it doen more than once and thus you want the process. Libraries show more of the dev process than a mobile demo application. This is why I am changing my resume to the form of mobile UI thesis rather than some muted static linkedin resuem profile. As the recruiter, Hr manager, and copany have to be educated on what makes agood mobile touch UI.

Tumblr has this nice Android Engineer position with relocation benefits and so since I am physically ill of the backwards Chicago start-up scene I am applying to tumblr.

The whole problem with the Google 5 app screens no menu approach is that its not well executed. There are sometimes when you will have 6 to 8 screens.

The navigation is easy in that you can always double up on swipes to get to the 2nd set of app screens. Its what yo do before than that sells the user on the app in that you can or should measure user actions and if they use a certain app screen than set that as the default screen that shows when they get to that part of the app.

For example in the Tumblr Android app if I use text in the write post portion in a heavy amount than that should show up as the default screen for that part of the app. It is not hard to do in a coding way just that you need to set it up that way in code.

There is also the area of UI simplification. If you are combining dashboard features along with nav tabs indicating where you are in the app than you might be doing it wrong. There is an obvious theme that could indicate where you are at in the app, ie level, color in fact.

You could choose on a certain level of 3 app screens to show the ActionBar app icon as a set of blues. Than in the post app screens show the ActionBar app icon in a set of reds. With the set of app settings screens being shown by greens.

Its always fun bringing the graphical vision you have for a game or mobile application to life. But its not always strictly just fun.

Java is one of those weird languages that was easy to set-up in the beginning but now due to specializing in mobile the time to set-up a project takes longer.

Today I was making some changes to set-up 3 variations on acceptance testing. One of them being cucumber, one being JavaMonkey run using Sikuli-ide and one using python MonkeyRunner.

I did not bother setting up a full apache ant build script because all this is being execute via my Eclipse IDE. It is just easier to do it that way so that I can move fast in coding.

Thus, what is left on Monday is drop in my AndroidProjectLibrary full of UI libraries and drop in the libraries for the Cucumber test project and than I can add some basic UI code Monday evening and do a test run on the UI.