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Why PBS Won't Do Android
bogaboga writes "You might be wondering why the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service doesn't have a compelling Android footprint. I was wondering too; until they provided the answer. They say, 'Simply put, it’s too complicated for us to even consider an Android app for the first version; we’ll continue to support those viewers with mobile web. ... As we’re focused on the tablet for this project, we’re only designing for the larger screen sizes. But even there, there are a wide range of sizes and aspect ratios. It’s possible to build flexible sizing for these screen layouts, just as we do for the range of desktop web screen sizes. But the flip side to these wide variations is that in a touch experience, ergonomics plays an important role in the design. Navigational elements need to be within easy reach of the edges of the screens since people often are holding their tablets. If the experience is not fine-tuned to each variation the experience would suffer.' They also cite fragmentation. I'm left wondering whether they didn't find support for various screen sizes on Android developer website. Their budget is undoubtedly limited; are their concerns legit? What companies and organizations have developed Android applications that are good to work with on various screen sizes?"
It's one of a few that allows airplay streaming in the background, allowing me to freely indulge my ADHD.
It definitely requires more man hours to visually verify things "look like they should" and this is very real with 50+ configurations of OS/screen size.
This mentality is not uncommon. Someone will see that there might be a problem somewhere and conclude that because they cannot have their vision of perfection, that they simply won't try at all. Consider this a victory for all of those screetching fanboys. They have achieved their desired result: FUD.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be useful.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's why all desktop application has fixed window sizes... my safari browser is set to 800x600 for backward compatibility.. and how dare thet make hardware with different resolutions... tss... ....what a load of crap.
I was under the impression that youtube had a nice app for all Android platforms? Or does PBS do something more than tv?
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Why would PBS write an app? Not trying to be snarky, I just have no idea why a producer of TV programming would make one. Is it for showing TV schedules?
This isn't a cop out. They are planning to support Android. Just not yet.
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer, they are a dime a dozen, and every two bit Newspaper, TV station, TV-Network, football team, Grocery Chain, Department store, and gossip site has an app. They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Stop hiring, and write a contract. Apps like these aren't that hard.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Oh, wait, no they aren't. They put on their big boy pants and DEAL WITH IT. Why is it that mobile designers are a bunch of crybabies about a problem that has existed since roughly forever ago?
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
"You might be wondering why the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service doesn't have a compelling Android footprint." This... this is a thing people spend their time wondering about? What a pointless thing to start an article with. Guess the editors are running out of good ways to spark another iPhone vs Android debate.
Left or right sided navigation, have a button at the top in the middle to flip what side it goes to.
Now you can have flexible out the ass with the fixed-size navigation bar up until it gets wider to a point where you can increase the size of that as well.
All mobile platforms support these features as far as I am aware and have done for years.
This including CSS @rules where you can set context-sensitive website rules very easily and is probably the most useful thing added besides CSS flexbox. (the very thing CSS positioning should have been from day1 instead of all the bullshit we got with broken positioning for years using about 10 different hacks or more just to make sure it looked good "so we weren't one of those tables for layout plebs")
Seriously, what the hell is the deal with that? It took over a decade and 3 major versions to add the one thing that every single person that has ever existed would have wanted, flexible positioning in every direction. Was it really that hard? Instead, all these useless things like display:table and about 50 other variants of other rules just so we can replicate 100% what Tables for Layout was like?
Still, at least the CSS working group isn't as bad as W3C. W3C is a whole higher level of terrible, that have transcended the meaning of terrible.
I'm sorry, but you don't need an app for viewing websites on a tablet, or a phone for that matter. What you need is for websites to properly support browser standards...but good luck with that.
this is exactly why projects like this should make portions of it available to the public. Think about how many programmers would donate their time to work on an Android version and satisfy their concerns!! And feed it back to them!
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
Sounds like most of the people for whom I've done web projects. They always try to tell me what it should look like, what drop down menus they think they'll need, etc... but when you try to pin them down on specifics regarding what it actually should do, it turns out they haven't spent much time thinking about that.
#DeleteChrome
There's only a need for 5 formats for even the most ergonomically fine-grained design. This is regardless of manufacturer/os, it is based on form-factor only. Actual resolution shouldn't matter. Its called vector graphics and dpi-aware css... for fucks sake, what is this 1992?
Jesus, give us a break. You can't go to a blog or any other site without being nagged to download their special app, usually via an annoying popup.
How to cheat your client.
Write a normal application on platform x (with resizable gui design)
Fix screen size
Tell client about the "difficulties" of different screen sizes and the "extra" costs
Carge extra!
Howmany developers developing for iphone did charge extra for the ("bigger resolution") ipad version of the app...
And article dude resizable apps are NOT uncommen, and any good GUI design book is a good starting point.
As an Android and iOS developer, it is tough to support all possible screen sizes, aspect ratios, hardware specs and versions of Android. Sometimes not having a newer version of Android(>= 4.0) you miss a lot of features that people come to expect and your code is riddle with backwards compatibility stuff just to support Gingerbread, or worse(ie: Donut).
Of course, it doesn't help that Google just made the Action Bar part of the backwards compatibility package, after all of this time not supporting it and saying just use the Sherlock library, which has it's own share of complications and headaches.
With videos it's even harder, my new phone only records in *.3gp files(for video, Razr Maxx HD), which means you have to have more transcoding on the backend to make it available to others.
And then you have the Note and Note 2 which are just mini-tablets and not really phone sized anymore. And the lack of support in Android(which iOS has btw) to figure out if you are on a phone or not, really hurts the user experience.
The cost is great, and the hassle is hard to justify, so with a fixed budget I am not surprised they aren't developing for it just yet.
And think even with the fragmentation going on the iOS land, they still only have like 5 screen sizes to worry about (in the tablet area), so you can really tweak the user-experience on each version of the iPad/iPad mini to make the most of the real estate and hardware. Plus they all share a common base with most of the features already there, so it makes it easier to program for, and less backwards-compatibility stuff in your code to mess with and support
Its possible that the demographic of Android users is not what PBS wants to attract.
All those iApp consumers MUST have more money than sense, they're the ones PBS want!!!
Their arguments are legit, but rooted in the old-fashioned way of designing/thinking user interfaces. In todays world professional designers *must* learn to build dynamic interfaces. There's simply no way around it any more. It comes with the trade. To say "we skip this platform cause we don't have fixed pixel measurements to design within" is another way of saying "we have got designers who simply refuse to learn modern design work." In a few years time we need to design interfaces that works both on tablets, car stereos, fridges and friggin' GLASSES, ffs. Tell the world then that you don't want to relate to dynamic interfaces in your work... :D
Bull Sh!t! Shame on you, PBS. I give you hundred$ every year, and this is the best "excuse" you can come up with? BS I say!
Yeah, who would have thought that the people who are making television don't know jack about computer programming! Sheesh.
Designing an app like this could.....could take time. An experienced developer would likely have to spend minutes, maybe even hours developing an app that can both read the resolution (perhaps based on the architecture) and then would have to use --oh God!-- a lookup table to determine the resolution. Then, they would have to use that resolution --from the lookup table-- as, as a... as a variable, to set the optimal screen size. But you would have to have someone who has done this once before, you couldn't just hire the local high school kid who has only written his own html web page, the one that says "Billys Web Page" in blinking green and blue neon colors. You might have to actually find someone (like someone who did it for the local tv station, or sports team, or business, or charity, or hire a kid from the local college where they teach them how do do this on the second day. NPR would have to do that. They would have to find someone who has maybe done at least one before (someone who has done two would be even better).
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design,
... and are trying to micromanage the interface. .
Most likely:
no
and yes
Sounds to me like designers talking. People who come from graphic design or ad-agencies and now do web design / interface design.
They usually want to micromanage the rendering. Because it has to look exactly as designed. Not just an interface with four buttons, but four buttons spaced in a perfectly pleasing way, perfect white space to text ratio, and please no substitute font! (Oh no, just the idea of that makes my black turtleneck crinkle.)
And look at the some of the crap applications that those two bit Newspaper, TV station, TV-Network, football team, Grocery Chain, Department store, and gossip site distribute!
Wealthy elitist liberals only use iPhone.
That by pure volume, there are WAY more Android devices out there than IOS devices. So the PBS arguments are bovine effluent. Look, YouTube works fine on my Android phone. Why not PBS?
With videos it's even harder, my new phone only records in *.3gp files
Wikipedia says 3GP, 3G2, and MP4 are essentially the same thing as MOV (the ISO base media file format), and video can be ASP or AVC. Did you try just renaming it to .mov or .mp4? Or do you need to transcode because your camera records ASP and browsers expect AVC?
Out of curiosity what does the iOS application do that the mobile web site doesn't?
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices....
I read TFA and it sounds more like an MBA made the decision.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
This mentality is not uncommon. Someone will see that there might be a problem somewhere and conclude that because they cannot have their vision of perfection, that they simply won't try at all. Consider this a victory for all of those screetching fanboys. They have achieved their desired result: FUD.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be useful.
I see this a lot here on Slashdot: folks assume trying costs nothing.
When an organization, or a person for that matter, has limited resources, one analyzes the situation to see if it's worth the risk to pursue an opportunity.
As an example that I know - In my case, it's app development. I don't have ANY Apple or Android products and to start app development, I would have to purchase those devices and in the case of Apple, an Apple computer also. ($1500 total: iPad and MacMini with montor - more if using iMac or MacBook Pro) And I would have to use a credit card to finance it - got it? So I MUST break even!
I don't have the $hundreds to $1500 to "just try and see". I would need to sell $1,500 worth of apps to just break even in the case of developing an iPad app, and looking at the market, there are very few apps that sell that much.
And I'm competing with folks who are giving their work away for free.. And EVERY idea I have has a FREE alternative - an excellent one at that.
I think of this as a business because I have no desire or use for an iOS or Android device. I would be buying that equipment for the sole reason of making money. And I see no opportunities to make a living as an independent developer and judging by the download figures for apps that cost money, very few folks are making enough to live off of independent app development.
Now there are some who like this stuff and spent the money and decided to develop apps and made a few bucks. But they are really just subsiding a hobby. Made enough for a MacBOok pro? Good for you? But you have a hobby - NOT a business.
tl;dr it's not worth it to me.
in the apple world, it's normal to tune for particular screen pixel-counts. in all of the rest of the world, mobile and not, from the mists of time forward, people simply treat screen size as a parameter. it's called "responsive", and all it means is that your app adjusts parametrically, so you don't have to customize it for every possible screen pixel dimension.
in otherwords, BOFH. PBS thinks it has competent computer people, but doesn't.
Hire developers that provide solutions, not excuses.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The reviews on the iPhone app (PBS by PBS Entertainment) are telling. They get barely more than 1-star. Most complaints are due to incompatibility. PBS is not in the app business, although it does need to reconsider its strategy. They could outsource the development, but I suspect they want careful control over the content and how it is delivered. Give them time.
I work with all sorts of developers of media apps in the big media companies, and I can tell you that Android media player fragmentation across versions is utterly horrific. The support just for media stacks across versions has changed so much, and the DRM so utterly buggered up, that companies such as VisualOn and Nexstreaming have essentially stepped in and built an entire media stack in software that bolts into any built-in decoders in the hardware, and provides streaming media frameworks as well as optional DRM. PBS, being publicly run, can't afford licensing these frameworks wide-scale app deployment at the app level nor afford the development cost of dealing with every version of Android. Using HTML5 is even worse due to lack of full screen playback standardization and codec chaos. Remember that Android is ultimately an OS that is best for ramming ads and redirecting you to Google and friends content properties. That's the mantra over at Google corporate, just like Windows is at MS. Developers have enough to do their silly pop games and social apps and bringing people into the Google App Store and Google Play with well-integrated Google ad network support. Sadly, I'm too cynical to be surprised about PBS' problems here. iOS is much better - HLS encode the content, send to the CDN origin server, point the API at the m3u8 URL, and you're basically done.
...due to screen sizing problems. The typical problem is that the font size and touch-sensitive areas are far too small, and don't respond to the "pinch" gesture.
In almost ALL applications, text entry of more than a word or phrase is close to unusable the text-selection cursors are too small to manipulate accurately; if you don't type it perfectly the first time, seeing and backspacing every error as you type it, your ability to make a correction in the middle of a block of text is close to nil.
If you read app reviews, you'll see that maybe 1/4 of all hidden-picture-adventure type games will be reported as unusable because something about the fit of the game to the physical screen ends up a required object, needed for future progress, unselectable.
So maybe the Android environment has solutions to all such problems, but on the evidence of actual applications, a LOT of developers either don't know the solutions or don't care about the user experience.
PBS at least shows that they care about the user experience.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Their kids site is almost entirely done in Flash. I assume they're comfortable with doing fixed-layout stuff - kinda like TV, I guess.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
http://xkcd.com/1174/
Thank you PBS.
... PBS won't be getting any donations from me.
Good is the enemy of great.
They're too dumb.
they are also repeating their FUD
No, it's that after actually examining real technical issues they found the FUD was not FUD at all, but a reality based concern where web apps on Android was the only feasible approach given the funds they had.
I am surprised more companies don't go the web route to support android - responsive design helps address the broad scale with many small increments, and Google has focused a ton on Chrome speed improvements over the ability to update older systems with newer development frameworks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So they *can* have a flexible-size layout that's they consider adequate in HTML5, but not in native code?
Yes, exactly!! That is exactly true. I don't think you understand how different layout is between a web vs.a native app. Some things that are very easy on the web are much harder in a native app. In fact this causes a lot of headaches for native developers who have clients that expect some things are easy because of web development...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
i've commented on their original article, but i'll restate it here: this is a (pretty hard) technical problem we could probably help you with. we automatically port iOS apps to android--allowing you develop for iOS whilst targeting android using the same code base. if anyone has questions about our technology, look at our website www.apportable.com or reach out to us on twitter: @apportable
It's pretty simple. If you target iPad you have two form factors and retina/non-retina, though you can really just do retina and let it downscale if you want. There are only 2-3 CPU/GPU profiles. That covers over half the tablet market, depending on who's numbers you believe.
On Android, you have to target 20 different devices, maybe more, just to get the majority of Android tablets. If you want 90% then the list gets much longer.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
So if I wanted to make a PBS app for them, would PBS work with me? Give me access to their API? Their video streams? If not... why not? We're helping to pay for it, right?
They don't have time to make it "perfect" for everyone, but I can guarantee you enough of us nerds grew up on Mr. Rogers that we could find a sufficiently skilled team of volunteers to do it.
Yeah, who would have thought that the people who are making television don't know jack about computer programming! Sheesh.
Maybe if they'd done a series on mobile application development they'd know something about it ;-)
Desktop developers have handled these issues for 25+ years now just fine. Nothing new.
The web is a flexible, universal and adaptable medium. Why the hell anyone would want an "app" solely to offer content that could just as easily (more easily, actually) be offered through a web browser is just needlessly jumping on the bandwagon.
I understand the why they might want to offload the graphics and UI to the system to reduce throughput and improve performance, but that's what AJAX and caching are supposed to be for, but they aren't always implemented correctly and almost nobody uses them properly.
I use cocos2d-x, and am waiting for QT to mature for iOS and Android, and am always keeping my eyes open for new and better multi-device architectures.
Using cocos2d-x as an example, I have little trouble programming away in C++ on my desktop at full speed, then checking to make sure that I haven't broken anything on iOS or android. By programming on my desktop I can change screen ratios and whatnot very quickly to make sure everything looks good. My code for iOS and Android has a minimal number of #ifdefs to tweek the very occasional platform specific bits. I love keeping things C++ as it is so wonderfully multi-platform while being able to access the finer bits of the various OSs. Only once have I even run into a tiny bit of trouble with endianness.
The real trick is to make sure that compiling in iOS and Android is kept as simple as possible. For example I keep the android part all command-line. I run a tiny script that compiles and installs the App while awaiting debug data. This then keeps me out of eclipse. The crazy thing is that if there are any android problems I don't even need to close my desktop IDE; just make the changes there and re-run the script.
The final deployment isn't that hard either. I don't presently even distribute desktop versions of the apps. Development is desktop based as it is just so much faster.
So I don't know what exactly the problem is. Personally I was looking into blasting out a Blackberry version of my latest app just to see how easy it would be. My suspicions are that getting any code running on the BB and then uploading it to the BB store will actually be the hardest bits.
Message me if you have any questions about this setup.
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing, and programmer for more than 30 years. And I'm with him and not you. You don't know what you are talking about.
Sure it's easy to make a good desktop app with a arbitrarily resizable interface. And it's easy to make a poor mobile app with a arbitrarily resizable interface.
But the best mobile apps ARE designed for fixed size screens. That's because the screen size is small compared to the size of the minimum UI element (dictated by the size of a fingertip. Quite simply screen space is at a premium. Not only does the optimum specific arrangement of UI elements vary, the optimum UI hierarchy varies. Screen designs are best when a designer considers the specific sizes. Auto layout is a always a compromise, and one that gets worse the smaller the screens in question,
They can be cookie cutter-ed from existing apps in less than a couple weeks by people who do this for a living. Apps like these aren't that hard.
The answer here is that your standards are low. That's why you think auto-layout is good enough. His opinion differs not because he knows less than you, but because his standards are higher.
Congratulations on having an attitude of superiority because your UIs don't use the available space on a device nearly as well as they could.
But iCrap devices now come in all different screen sizes, aspect ratios, and resolutions, with an array of different versions of iOS amongst them. So clearly someone is either talking out their ass or has taken a large donation from some guy named T. Cook.
This sounds like they have zero experience in application design, much less for mobile devices, and never learned a thing about hardware abstraction, and are trying to micromanage the interface. Sounds like they even skipped web design, and are coming directly from the printed page mind-set.
Their ipad app should already use Model View Controller. They just need to rewrite everything in Java, and incorporate a few android specific fixes. Easy!
How I know you're bullshitting:
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing,
Apple IOS Development platform first release: February 2008.
Android Development Platform first release: August 2008.
Its 2013. You do the math.
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The iPad app is crap.
It's missing the obvious, trivial user interface items like last broadcast date on shows that make finding new content other than the featured content REALLY painful. It's eye-candy heavy and usability light. The video player (the absolute core of the thing, really) has always crashed on my iPad, even though they've clearly changed their core player software (from one crashing system to another).
They should be making a much simpler, rock solid app. It's their fear of their eye-candy not looking the same which is driving this, or their fear of not being able to be sure that their ads will show.
NPR's iPhone app suffers from the same usability issues, though thanksfully isn't laden with eye-candy.
"Mobile apps" have been a thing since the 90s. And a lot of people doing mobile dev now have decades of general development experience....
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
As a cross platform game developer myself, I have no sympathy for PBS. Making sure your GUI works on every display takes a bit more work but is really not that complicated. PC software devs have been doing it since the beginning of time. A mobile app is really nothing special.
Just stop using that archaic mentality of 'everything must look exactly-like-I-designed-it-in-photoshop' and anchor your interface elements to one or more sides on the screen. If you want to divide the screen into various areas, then working with percentage dimensions can be useful. This is grade school math! For a video player it's even easier. The GUI is only needed rarely and can be hidden when not used, so you don't even need to worry about obscuring the content.
Frankly I don't really care about native or web-based, apart from performance concerns. Any idiot can make something horrible in either, and any decent dev can do something useful with either. Differing screen resolutions is just a bullshit excuse because you are too lazy to support but don't want to admit giving one platform preferential treatment.
Subject says it all. All of these devices do or should support vector graphics. Developers on any platform need to get out of the bitmap mindset and platform/os vendors need to ensure that their vector support is the primary focus, bitmap based ui's will always suffer.
I think they need to make an HTML5 app, that will run on most smart phones. There is very little reason not to.
Every single company that has any kind of content has to write an app, for every single platform, all the time?
No.
Um.
Newton launch: 1993
Palm Launch:1997
we could go on, but mobile development didn't start with iPhone and Android. It just got to be something you could really make money with:)
All that time, and still haven't learned to use the IDEs? No wonder multiple screen sized present such a challenge.
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And that comment is how we all know you're either trolling or an idiot.
I don't have ANY Apple or Android products and to start app development, I would have to purchase those devices and in the case of Apple, an Apple computer also. ($1500 total: iPad and MacMini with montor - more if using iMac or MacBook Pro) And I would have to use a credit card to finance it - got it? So I MUST break even!
Why MUST you break even right away?
If you realize the future of computing in most instances of mobile computing then suddenly you realize that tiny outlay is a small investment for massive future potential.
And factoring in the cost of a Mac for iPhone development is like saying you wouldn't have a computer otherwise. Come on.
Now there are some who like this stuff and spent the money and decided to develop apps and made a few bucks. But they are really just subsiding a hobby. Made enough for a MacBOok pro? Good for you? But you have a hobby - NOT a business.
Look at the sheer number of free apps. That tells you right away there is substantial money to be made - if not selling apps yourself, then in building apps for others. Both Android and iOS developers contracting or working for other companies do in fact have a business, because they live entirely off this income. And business is only growing, not diminishing...
Basically, what I am saying here is that it's very short-sighted to avoid mobile development now because of some tiny outlay, and doom the rest of your future development career to some niche.
Well, OK, server-side development is not really a niche. But even there (or especially there) a background in mobile development will help.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't remember anyone saying that Java would solve screen resolution problems like this?
Actually it did try to address that with Swing and GridBagLayout...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Android is the biggest player today.
This is false from the standpoint of people writing apps other people will use.
Many Android phones are dirt cheap things not really suitable to run any applications on.
We already know iOS apps continue to pull in far more revenue... Android is growing but usual revenue is at least half as much.
PBS decision makers often show Apple products, they are Apple fans.
But then, so are most people.
That's the only reason why Android is being black listed.
Android is being supported through mobile web apps. That's hardly blacklisting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ARM chipset vendors have been providing highly-optimized hardware-accelerated OpenVG libraries. Many of these run Android. The libraries even exist on some Android devices but appear unutilized. What's a good and efficient solution for developers to support multiple screen sizes? Easy! Use vector-defined graphics assets, but preparing bitmaps is somewhat time-consuming. OpenVG is designed for the very purpose of these tasks in hardware, and having seen some demos of OpenVG rendering smoothly on tiny devices at 1080p, it seems like a great solution to deal with the wide array of screen sizes. Other solutions are just scale up via OpenGL but this looks lame (especially on Nexus 10) or use one of few OpenGL-based VG renderers but these possibly are rather suboptimal compared to vendor's VG HW rasterization.
what more can you say
The fact that you thought mobile apps started with iOS pretty much renders your opinion moot.
It's obvious from this comment that you've never developed on mobile back in the day. I developed on WinCE scanning devices and getting the layout usable was a pain regardless of IDE was used. So we gave two options for our customers: Buy from the list of recommended devices or pay for customization.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They're a non-profit that has to beg for money every year. If it's so easy I'm sure they'll do it if you volunteer to develop and support it.
so sad.
That was then, this is now. Its time to step up your game.
Did you dictate screen size to your desktop customers too?
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They pay their own salaries every year without fail. They have a 291 million dollar budget.
Non profit means that there should be, and normally is nothing left after covering their costs and salaries, rent, plant, etc. You might want to read up on it.
It doesn't mean that their vendors don't get paid and everyone who works there works for free.
Support services make up 21% of their budget.
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I'm using FlashBuilder 4.7, and that is how I make my Android Aps. Flash does not give a good way to read the screen resolution in Android(I searched this problem for over a year). I actually wrote a hack in my program where the user basically calibrates the screen size to his device. I put a giant zoom button to the right and a giant zoom button to the bottom. If you press it, the screen gets incrementally bigger until the zoom buttons are no longer on the screen. I save that data to local, and you never see them again.
God spoke to me
That was then, this is now. Its time to step up your game.
You want to pay my salary and front the company money for your experiments go ahead. We are in it to make money. There's very little profit in maintaining a bazillion variations. We don't have unlimited time or manpower.
Did you dictate screen size to your desktop customers too?
Um, we are talking about mobile devices. Mobile devices which still have a plethora of variations. And yes we dictate hardware requirements all the time for mobile devices. We don't run on ancient hardware for example. Other than making our own hardware, we have to do what is best. Designing for every screen possible is not in our best interest.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How do you develop apps on computers? Those seem to be the ultimate of non-standard display sizes. You can find displays of anything from about 1024x768 up to about 2560x1600 on most modern systems, with anything in between. Lots of aspect ratios too, 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10, 21:9. Yet somehow lots, and lots and lots of developers seem to be able to make their stuff work. It can deal with the concept of repositioning elements, scaling UI (games in particular are often quite good at this) and relative positioning.
It is just on mobile devices that devs seem to want to assume everything should be one size, and they can just make everything in an absolute fashion.
Here is why non-technical people seem to care more about the look and feel than the functionality: They're trying to effect an emotion in themselves and other users by virtue of the interface and design.
But it also means you shouldn't waste money because no matter how well you work your budget can get cut significantly if people feel you pissing your cash away. Not that it matters too much but NPR and PBS are not the same company though both are linked to the CPB who provide funds to both as well as others. And you'll notice NPR gets 40% of its funds from individuals donating. They're quite vulnerable from people getting put off from thinking they're wasting money.
But also, I should say that I think the whole mobile app thing is silly. It should be a mobile site for all devices. Apps as a whole are mostly pointless unless you're making a game. Support and development would be cheaper for anyone if they did their app as a web app.
epoc16 - 1989 ( successor: epoc32 - 1997 witch version ER5 was renamed Symbian OS 5 )
"compelling Android footprint"
Come on, this is pathetic.
NPR's preferences are not a reason to use or not use a device.
However, the absence of a well defined set of standards for hardware
and software certainly IS a good reason to avoid Android devices.
That, and the fact that all of them have a backdoor which allows Google
to spy on virtually everything you do.
And that is pretty terrible. You're punishing the user for your bad technology decision.
The devs doing the programming for PBS are Apple worshippers, and have fed lots of excuses to the mgmt as to why they can't/won't do an android version.
Acting like variations in screen size (including usability concerns) are some brand new thing to development is idiotic. It's a lame excuse.
Now, if they had simply said "market penetration simply is there from an ROI perspective" that'd at least not be a giant fake excuse.
Don't make mobile web *apps*, make mobile web *sites*.
NO! 10000x NO!
Mobile web sites, without exception (that includes you SLashdot) SUCK HORRIBLY.
I can use any modern mobile browser to easily read a normal website. Do NOT give me a feature-reduced 1998 version of your website.
What COULD work, is making a mobile web-app for your site that acts much like a native app, but provides some specialized features hard to do with a pure web page. But it would be totally a side thing and not replace the main site at all.
Apps when done right enhance what you do with a site. Mobile versions of a web page invariably detract.
So if you are going to go web-mobile, make it an app.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My god, people, go out and hire an app developer
You go find a good Android developer that can work on NPR salaries. Not that easy to find.
And don't forget, after an app is built, you also must support it...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://xkcd.com/1174/
"Your screen size argument affecting the overall experience requiring fine-tuning for each size clearly shows your vast inexperience with Android development. While that may have been the case 15 versions ago for the SDK, it is not even remotely the case with the latest builds of the SDK.
... which in turn makes you look foolish.
In addition, you only need to support Android 2.2 (2.5% share) and higher, 1.5 and 1.6 and those in between devices are long gone and only a micro-fraction of a micro-fraction of the existing devices in use today. The reality is Gingerbread 2.3.x is around 30%-35%, Ice Cream Sandwich is around 20%-35% and Jelly Bean is around 30%-35%.
If either of your points were valid, we wouldn't have half of the professional apps we currently have and enjoy on our Android phones, and I assure you, a lot of them are a lot more complex than your FRONTLINE App would ever be and run just fine on Gingerbread 2.3.x. If Netflix can do it, PBS can do it.
I would suggest consulting an avid Android developer that despises Apple to get the real facts. Any Apple fan is going to tell you it is too much of a burden to develop for Android
I've been developing on Android for years and can tell you I could make a single FRONTLINE App that would work on both phones and tablets from Android 2.3.x on up seamlessly and with little effort to do so." link
AccountKiller
Sorry you attitude of expecting every Android developer to write their own screen resolutions API or management framework is exactly what people are complaining about on Android.
You're not supposed to have to write HALs in the modern world of 3rd gen programming languages.
I spent a bit of time developing for PBS before I quit. It was awhile ago, but I had a few run-ins with them after that on a contractor level as well. Their IT department is incredibly dysfunctional and full of itself. Maybe things changed, but when I was there, it was run by English majors and such with no clue, and demoralizing job titles.
PBS has never really been good at keeping basic things in order, so expecting them to either design a great responsive web app or a native app is not really surprising. I really would not listen to anything they say as technical truth. It's a really ugly, bad culture there in IT and they are in no place to talk about anything as a technical authority.
Why is it that only PBS has such terrible trouble?
The concerns are legitimate, but they're created by the developers. The first thing to do is stop designing the UI like it has to be pixel-perfect and stop doing absolute positioning. Your graphics elements, you'll probably need a couple different sizes but each one will be for a range of screen sizes. You don't care about making the graphics elements the exact size to the pixel, just roughly comfortably sized for the screen you have. Then think of the screen in terms of 4 edges and 8 anchor points (4 corners, 4 mid-points). Lay your UI out relative to those 8 anchor points, and let things float depending on screen size. For a media player, for instance, lay your control buttons out centered on the top or bottom of the screen and let the whitespace to the left and right vary depending on how big the screen is. Each size of button will fit a range of screens, you only care about size when the screen gets narrow or wide enough that you need to switch to the next smaller or larger set of icons to keep the control bar fitting without being too tiny or being wider than the screen. Yes, this is harder than laying everything out in terms of absolute positions. This is what your developers are being paid to do. If they haven't learned how, fire them and hire competent replacements.
When it works on your platform, XBMC is a way to get PBS content in an Android app. The interface is bad, but better than having to use the website.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So basically this is the same reason why developers made programs for Macintosh that weren't available on Windows. Because Mac was always a simpler market to address because of the fewer hardware versions and system versions that the programs had to run on. Thus vastly more software titles were available for Macintosh than for Windows.
Except for the fact that it's utter bullshit. The reason they're supporting iOS is that there are so many iPads, and relatively fewer Android tablets. They'll support Android apps when they reach a market threshold. Difficulty has nothing to do with it.
That's OK They've decided it's not worth they money to get my attention and my money. As they sow, so shall they shall reap.
Saying something "doesn't work" flat out shows that you didn't really spend the time learning and adapting your thought pattern.
I developed quite a few Android/iOS apps and adapting to all resolution is pretty easy while still giving a reasonable experience. The problem is the iOS mentality of pixel perfect design where everything needs to be in the exact photoshop location where the designer said it should be. This is now a problem with the iPhone 5 not to mention landscape/portrait so Android was way ahead here.
There are device fragmentation issues e.g. in app payments/push between Play and Kindel, I had some issues with minor HTTP stack differences between android devices/versions but since I can publish an Android app instantly and get stacks for crash reports solving these issues is rather trivial and I don't need to test on every single device or even on a wide set of devices. Just a few "hero devices".
Take your goddamned userbase and leverage it, assholes.
Force either 16:9, 4:3, 3:2, or 16:10, or tell them to go fuck themselves with a rubber hose.
If you can't do that then you're not worth the tax money and donations we send your fucking way.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The development work would cut into the high salaries the PBS executives pay themselves.
Remembet when they were mostly volunteers???
Next tiem you see 2 talking heads endlessly nattering at you at their endless routine interrupting telethons, consider it really only takes one engineer and someone to order receive and load tapes to actually operate those stations. The rest is bloat paid for by taxdollars and people who think they are helping by sending their money to a bunch of con-artists.
you're an idiot.
Sounds like you are making it hard for yourself by expecting perfection.
Let's take iOS as an example. There are four basic resolutions/screen sizes to deal with: 480x320, 960x640, 1136x640, 1024x768 and 2048x1536. Double that because you need to support both portrait and landscape modes. So, were you planning to do 8 different UI layouts to make maximum use of every device in every orientation? What about people who need a bigger font because their vision isn't perfect?
Unfortunately Apple has been encouraging people to target every resolution directly and have pixel-perfect UIs, preferably fully skinned into some kind of skeuomorphic design.
The simple fact is that you don't need different UIs for a 3.5" 800x600 and a 4.8" 1920x1200 screen. You just need to scale what you have. If someone bought a small phone they expect things on the screen to be small. If they bought a giant 5.5" phone they expect things to be large. They probably bought that huge thing to make seeing and tapping stuff easier, so they last thing they want is for you to make it all smaller again.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
bogaboga has obviously not implemented a custom UI on Android. His link to supporting different screen sizes etc. on Android shows that he thinks the capabilities listed there offers a simple way of implementing a consistent custom UI across devices. It does seem like that until you try it. Take a UI from touch-based app and try to make it work uniformly over Android devices, and see for yourself.
my torrent client; only seeders and trackers wanted.
Stop digging. You haven't hit the bottom yet, but that's where you're heading.
Nice try icebike, but it seems you have no clue how things work in the real world when it comes to mobile development.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Windows CE existing in the 90's the Nokia Communicator appeared in '98/99 heck the Nokia 7650 the first "smartphone" was released in 2003
The PalmPilot (PalmOS) was first released in 1997 and WinCE in 1996. And yes, those were mobile applications had to deal with the same problems of screen resolution, sizes (PalmPilot vs PalmIII vs PalmIIIc) and different OS (PalmOS, WinCE) as today.
From PBS that is, PBS is all about the money, always have been always will be. They contribute to...PBS and anyone else that ultimately legitimizes PBS. The fact that they'd take such a careful, conservative approach is damn convenient and odd considering most of the opinions here are glad-ragging democrats. Why do they have an ipad app? (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pbs/id410053365?mt=8) Maybe Apple paid for it. Probably ran out of money after that project. I'm probably all wet on this one, but dang if a "benevolent" association could be painted in such conservatively, hypocritical Light. Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television. - David Letterman probably the funniest thing letterman ever said, he didn't write it.
Maybe, thought, it's that they just can't be bothered, looked and heard all the bullshit about "fragmentation" and never even tried.
[voice=Malibu Stacy]Computers are hard![/voice]
But don't be suprised if you make your DRM'd stuff available and it doesn't get used.
If you want to keep control of your stuff, dont let me have it. DO NOT demand I cede control of MY stuff so YOUR stuff can be protected.
You're just butt-hurt because we won't let non-DRM infect HTML5. GET THIS INTO YOUR THICK HEAD: The HTML5 DRM proposal DID NOT propose adding DRM to the web standard, it proposed fucking over a standard so the NON-STANDARD DRM module could be used to hijack every browser.
That's called "hacking", kid.
PBS didn't develop the mobile apps themselves, doesn't their developer (BR?) deserve some of the blame too?
Exactly. For the love of code.. Why don't they just use the Corona SDK or one of the other similar and even free systems for easy cross-platform coding? The Corona SDK can be set to auto-scale etc etc and compile the same app for iOS and Android and others too.
I honestly think PBS just has some dipshits working for them in that department.
http://www.coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/
subject says it all.
All you are doing is underlining your lack of knowledge of mobile app development. Before those you mention, there was WinCE, Symbian, EPOC, GeOS.
Heck before I got involved in mobile development myself, the first contractor that I had dealings with that was doing mobile development was back in 1986. The device was about the size of one of today's phablets, though nearly an inch thick. I don't recall the OS now. So that's, what, 26 years ago.
Someone's bullshitting here, and it ain't me.
WTF? Screen layout is not dependant on IDEs. Not even slightly. Whether fixed layout or auto-layout.
Modern IDEs generally offer built in layout editors. But they are just a convenience. They don't allow you to do what you can't do with code. Indeed they inevitably allow less than you can do with code.
You haven't a clue.
Half baked standards and APIs which ignore must prior experience in favor of marketing cachet.
Heresy, I know.
How I know you're bullshitting:
I'm a mobile app developer of 16 years standing,
Apple IOS Development platform first release: February 2008. Android Development Platform first release: August 2008.
Its 2013. You do the math.
Newton - 1993
Palm Pilot - 1996
The world began before you were toilet trained..
That is the most Backseat Programmer response I have seen in quite some time.
Here on earth, we don't have ready-made TeX layout engines we can just embed in an application, and there are significant delays in embedding HTML5 views in the middle of things. The reason you are even building a native app at all is for low latency UI and none of the things you describe offer that in any way.
iOS6 and beyond do ship with a rich constraint engine for layout but those are really only good for a limited range of sizes, after which you simply need a different UI, not bigger or smaller boxes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"We're apple snobs who want donation money from people who blow money on i-products. Now roll out the usual lame claims about fragmentation and cheap flaky devices, which is totally overblown and irrelevant. Please don't ask how it is that everyone else on earth manages to turn out ios and android versions of anything and everything, and it works just fine for everyone except the people who bought knock off chinatabs and chinaphones, who aren't affected and don't care because half of the rest of the apps they try don't work either".
The sad truth is that the vast majority of android devices run on three versions of android and it hardly rocket surgery to get an app to work on those. Or you can do what many ios developers do and only allow the app to run on the more recent versions of android. I have a number of ~3 year old apple devices that won't run ios past v3 or v4, and lots and lots of apps that require 4 or 5 to operate. Why a recipe app requires ios5 is a mighty fine mystery to me, but there it is.
It is absolutely, positively no harder or more expensive to build an android app that runs only on gingerbread/ics/jellybean and only runs on majority well established devices than it is to write an app to work on ios v3-5. A choice was made, and that choice has absolutely, positively no grounding in technical complexity, market factors or anything else. The choice was "We're only going to spend $xxx, lets write for the audience we'll get the most donations from".
is spent entirely on fund raising
Hi,
This is exactly what I've been researching recently. I would love to read more about your setup and see if it would work for my use cases. I would suggest you post something on your blog.
BTW, it's hard to find a contact email for you.
Psion Organizer: 1984
Mobile development started well before Apple and Android.
Start your re-education here old man:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html
http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/android/android-layout/
Developing for multiple different screen sizes is not that big of a deal, unless your brain is trapped in the printed-page analogy. Its been done this way for 20 years. In this day and age Its. just. not. a. problem.
Clearly the one who has no clue about the modern world is you.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
And before that there was the Daily Planner book that everyone carried around.
That is no excuse for failing to keep up with modern techniques and programming methods and continuing to enforce your printed-page mindset on the Android world.
Its not your lawn anymore.
(Oh, and Psion was barely serviceable even when it was the new shiny best thing ever. Nobody did any serious development for it because it was basically a useless device even it its heyday).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I programmed on a TI calculator, Palm VII, V, blackberry, and earlier - probably while you were still dreaming of calling people's bluffs on Slashdot.
Oh and FYI just so you don't embarrass yourself in the future, Apple and Android are not the only companies in existence in the mobile scene. I know they would LOVE for you to think that, but it's simply not the case.
Ok I think all that's cleared up now
You app can be killed at any time.
Same is true of iOS.
Your display contexts get destroyed all the time and you have to be ready to re-create them.
Same is true of iOS (viewDidUnload).
Apple made things somewhat easier by not having true multitasking
As far as an app is concerned is has true multi-tasking, with multiple threads and so on - also there are any number of system events that can affect a running app like a call status bar being introduced, or memory being eaten up by some hungry background task (like mail or in the past few years just any other application finishing processing).
iOS developers don't have it any easier in regards to supporting all these things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Since when has Windows CE NOT been a Mobile App platform?
Or FFS Symbian?
Since they have been obsolete for almost 10 years.
The world has evolved while you were resting on your laurels.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There are four basic resolutions/screen sizes to deal with: 480x320, 960x640, 1136x640, 1024x768 and 2048x1536. Double that because you need to support both portrait and landscape modes. So, were you planning to do 8 different UI layouts to make maximum use of every device in every orientation?
Not quite. The pixel doubling is largely irrelevant to app UI design. (Though decent apps will have different icons and other bitmaps for both.) And for portrait the portrait designs for apps of content scrolling nature, the difference between 1136, and 960 pixels is not usually significant.
So most of the time there's two UI designs times 2 orientations. Though there's twice as many graphic assets as that.
The simple fact is that you don't need different UIs for a 3.5" 800x600 and a 4.8" 1920x1200 screen.
That's not a simple fact at all. It's the opinion of someone who either doesn't do this for a living, or has a low standard of work.
You just need to scale what you have.
There's no such thing as "just" scaling. If you scale icons, they'll look bad in all variations except one. If you auto-layout there are many cases where the content will either look too cramped, or too sparse, or be inappropriately truncated.
They probably bought that huge thing to make seeing and tapping stuff easier, so they last thing they want is for you to make it all smaller again.
Wrong. You can't make an assumption that the owner of a larger device is myopic or indelicate. There are all sorts of reasons for people's choice of device sizes.
Start your re-education here old man
Your grudging acceptance of the number of years of knowledge of mobile development is noted.
Developing for multiple different screen sizes is not that big of a deal, unless your brain is trapped in the printed-page analogy. Its been done this way for 20 years. In this day and age Its. just. not. a. problem.
We've already established you don't know what you're talking about. In your earlier message you were unaware that mobile development was more than 6 years old. Now you're attempting to tell me how things have been done for 20 years.
I work in app development now. You don't.
I know exactly where it's a problem and where it isn't. And you don't.
That is all.
How is this modded up? Windows and Palm had mobile apps long before 2008.
Back sometime in the 90s, I read a fascinating article on the difference between mobile and desktop programming on the Palm site. Just because PDAs are mostly obsolete now doesn't mean they never existed.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Speaking of No No's, not closing your blockquote tag is a HUGE no no. It looks like you are talking to yourself.
I wrote the original article - to be clear I was speaking for FRONTLINE, not PBS. anyway I wrote this piece as a follow up http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/labs/more-on-frontlines-android-plans/