@danroundhill: during last week’s dev chat you asked about sliding menus. Not sure if you have done much research into, but this project just came across my desk today (at least one team at Google is planning on using it) that might be worth looking into: https://github.com/jfeinstein10/SlidingMenu It has instructions for working with ActionBarSherlock, which is definitely promising.
Kinda makes me want to do a navigation UI sprint that adds in a real action bar and this slideing menu. Maybe not a full UI overhaul, as I don’t think that’s really necessary… but just the two of these would be great additions. You mentioned you already had a patch for adding in Sherlock. How far along is that?
Dan 8:37 am on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Yes, there’s actually a few of us now that feel like a sliding menu + Action Bar would be an awesome upgrade for the app. I think the Action Bar version I was working on is 70% there. I can get it wrapped up and committed (somewhere) this week.
Sounds like this is a good feature change for version 2.3
Ping @kokejb, I know you had some thoughts on this as well.
Koke 10:15 am on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Yeah, we discussed in the past trying to unify the UI across all the apps, but staying true to the platform. The funny thing is that making the android app more modern by using action bars + sliding menu, we’d also be closer to the iOS UI.
My thoughts for it were (and most of it applies to other platforms as well):
But then… how often do you go to edit a 2 months old post? or look at comments that you already read/moderated/replied?
Why not merge the reader with everything else? So here’s another thought:
Pages are more complicated, since many users will only have an About page (and maybe a few more), but in the case of WP as a CMS, pages could be one of the most useful things in the app.
So for pages, and other more specific use cases, we can keep the per-blog posts/pages/comments/stats navigation “hidden” in the sliding menu
Now, most of this comment is just raw ideas, and not trivial to implement (specially thinking of combined stats and search), but we can start taking small steps until we arrive there
Maybe we can talk about it a bit more in tomorrow’s dev chat?
Koke 10:20 am on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Also, both in the new stream view or the current post list, I’d drop the “list style” and start showing more of the post content: excerpt, image thumbnail or feature image if there is one
Will Norris 1:41 pm on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
one of the latest Android Design in Action episodes focused on iterative improvements (slides) and included some UI improvements similar to what you’re describing. Well worth a look.
Isaac Keyet 11:36 am on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Small wins are the best wins. We may be headed in this direction but we nothing is certain just yet.
If we could start by adding the native appbar and a sliding menu (spinner?) as a first step I think that’d be a huge win and would teach us a lot about what’s to come.
Will Norris 1:45 pm on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
agreed, I think just starting with a simplified sliding menu that covers the existing navigation options (blog selector and the current dashboard) would be fine. Once the basic framework is in place, it’s much easier to then experiment with ways of organizing the menu, putting notifications in the menu a la Google+, etc.
Dan 1:58 pm on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Slightly related
@ievolver, there’s a style generator for the action bar/holo. You should play around with it sometime:
http://jgilfelt.github.com/android-actionbarstylegenerator/
Personally I like how it looks with the light theme with dark action bar, and use a dark WP blue for the action bar background with a white WP logo.
Isaac Keyet 4:12 pm on January 22, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Made a note of it!