I asked about it in chat earlier this week, but @ievolver wasn’t entirely sure… can we get rid of the GPL screen that is displayed on first launch? It’s meaningless to have an end user agree to the GPL, since it doesn’t apply to them at all (it’s not a EULA)… it applies to developers. And it’s not the best first experience for users to see a full screen of legal jargon.
Besides, I think Android is the only app that does this (well, at least iOS doesn’t do it).
@danroundhill: any objections?
@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?
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Made a note of it!
@ievolver, could you send me a few more icons for the various app stores?
Will do. I’m also updating the promotional graphics, I guess those need to be submitted at the same time?
Yeah it works best to submit it all at the same time. Do you think you could have them over by tomorrow?
For sure.
@ievolver – I created another app icon, non-shiny with a subtle drop shadow. Thoughts on this? Here’s how it looks at all of the different DPIs:
Nice! This is probably good enough, but we might want to sync the styles even closer with the .com version. Adding a todo to look into this.
@ievolver, now that Android Market is Called Google Play, we’ll need to update the download links and icons on the main site.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wordpress.android
Yep, it’s on my list already
@ievolver, I’ve been working on the few remaining touches to WPAndroid 2.0, I took the quick photo icon from WPiOS, lightened it up a bit and put it on the formatting toolbar. I wish it could convey ‘video’ somehow as well but I think it works for now.
I like it, although I did make an Android specific icon (it’s very similar). This works but we should update it again if we have time – a + next to it would make sense, too.
Dan 4:44 pm on February 15, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
No objections, I think I added that way back based on Google’s guidelines to have some sort of EULA in there. But yeah it doesn’t really work to use the GPL for that.
Danilo 2:42 am on February 16, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The WindowsPhone app does the same. Should I remove the GPL screen even in that app?
Dan 7:22 am on February 17, 2013 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Sure, might as well.