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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?"
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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?
It's an app. You've got to write apps.
Just like, a few years ago, you had to replace local applications with web pages because everything was going to 'web apps'. Fads come, fads go.
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.
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
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
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.)
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.
yes but they shouldn't need to - after 3 it becomes irrelevant if the number is 30, 50 or 2000. their mobile webview certainly isn't tested on 1000 screens - their web version certainly isn't tested on all screen sizes and resolutions(let's just say 20 possible screen sizes and 20 possible different resolutions and 30 possible viewing distances .. you should get the point, you just don't design things in pixel perfect fashion).
it's more of a problem of wanting it too perfect or having designers unable to think in flexible terms - as if they were designing a desktop app with a scaleable window. btw those ui designers are rapidly becoming useless on apple as well, but maybe they'll have few years still on windows phone(why do you think ios7 is flat design and no longer imitations of things draw for that single screen size.. flat design is easier to make flexible, so they went with that, same with metros just text elements floating around style..)...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
Except now instead of maintaining one website, you're maintaining one app for Windows, one for Mac, three (or four or five...) for Linux, one for iPhone, one for Android, one for...
I love my sig.
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
Android is, well, inconsistent and fragmented. There are android phones that are rock solid and phones that are absolute shit (lockups, random reboots. etc). Now mix that with all the various versions of Android OS and it becomes a real problem ensuring quality control for your entire PBS audience. With the iPhone, development and expected results via testing are easier to manage.
Life is not for the lazy.
Oh, nonsense. I've been watching PBS shows online for what, eight years now? The quality of their programs are top notch.
If you watch, for instance, a recent episode of Nature, there will be a quick 15 second ad at the beginning, and another 15 second ad somewhere around the halfway point. That's it. That's a hell of a deal considering the amount of ads that are played on Hulu (a paid-for service) dwarf what are shown on PBS, and they're all for Viagra to boot.
Does PBS nag a little bit sometimes to try and persuade users to donate? Sure, of course they do, but the best persuasion is the quality of their programming. Frontline, Nova, and Nature are probably three of the best programs in the world.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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
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.
UI design needs to have every element scalable by percentage.
Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
Then the same application that runs on my Android phone can also run on my Windows/Linux laptop/desktop.
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.
Android is, well, inconsistent and fragmented. There are android phones that are rock solid and phones that are absolute shit (lockups, random reboots. etc). Now mix that with all the various versions of Android OS and it becomes a real problem ensuring quality control for your entire PBS audience. With the iPhone, development and expected results via testing are easier to manage.
Quality control is the last thing you think about when you think "PBS". Many of them are run by local community colleges, and while there's some great stuff put out it's often not professional quality in terms of the production.
The real answer is that PBS relies on grants and public funds, and Apple has always had their claws deep into those types of markets. I'm sure if Google started supplying a bunch of funding to them, they'd develop for it in a heartbeat.
Exactly. It reminds me of the times when there were websites displaying in 640x480 no matter the resolutrion of your screen. Some designers apparently feel excruciating physical pain at the thought that one viewer in podunk might see a single pixel rendered off by 1.
The same people insist on hyper expensive calibrated lights, monitors, paper, and ink to get the colors just right on a flyer even though the readers will be in widely varying light wearing a variety of tinted glasses with completely unknown backgrounds.
They simply don't get relative layouts or the concept that the viewer is supposed to control the presentation.
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
I used to work with one of these people. I liked him a lot. But he came from the advertising world and from printed media. He was used (years of experience) to being able to start a project with a SIZE.
So the first thing he did on any web project was define a box of a fixed size, and float it in the middle of the page. Change the page size all you liked, the content stayed the same size.
Then he nailed down all the fonts so you couldn't adjust them. He used pictures for text all over the place, because they looked exactly like the fonts he was using, so there was no difference. You wouldn't change the font yourself, right? You'd never know.
And you see this all the time, on the web. Not sure if all the culprits come from print media, but they seem to have that same urge: Control the experience. Completely. Utterly ignore the fact that people have bigger and smaller screens, disabilities which cause them to prefer different font sizes or colors, etc.
Tiny screen? Tiny buttons. Tiny text.
Big screen? Big buttons. Big text.
That's a really stupid design concept.
Ideally, on touchscreen devices:
- The right size for buttons is about the size of my finger (Which is fairly constant for most humans)
- The right location for buttons is where my finger can reach it easily. (Again, fairly constant for most humans)
- The right size for text is so it's readable. (That can be quite variable for many humans, and also depend on screen resolution and technology)
If I have a bigger screen, I want to display more information, rather than display the same amount of information in a bigger text.
Also if the designer is really dumb and scale everything to full screen, then aspect ratio is messed up and the pictures look weird
Web sites are sometime hard to use on phones because it's hard to click on links, which are buttons the same size as text. My eyes have better definition than my finger. Phone apps that are not optimized for tablets are wasting the tablet potential.
Running an phone app on a desktop machine is usually a terrible experience.
Apple didnt solve that problem any more than Android, they just have less of it. But they do have that same problem for iPad vs iPad mini. Some apps are harder to use on mini because buttons and texts were sized for the big ipads.
Websites can usually achieve useful compromises.
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?
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.
PBS lies. 95% of the great programming is during pledge breaks, interrupted by lengthy self-commercials hyping commercial-free TV. Once they get your money, they go back to the same old bland programming. It's bait and switch.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
They don't want a repeat of the PBS Kids Super Why app debacle, where they had inexperienced developers design a very static ui which really didn't scale at all. The app worked on a single device on android 2.2
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beancreative.superwhy.android
They're using their grammar skills there.
I will say that this also comes from many, many users, who will consistently rate a page that has everything tuned to perfection as "more professional" and thus more trustworthy.
It's not just stupid designers. There really is a customer-experience trade-off that is valued by the customers, as long as they have exactly the right screen size. It's one of the disadvantages that Android lives with. The flexibility means that it's not practical to offer the same customer experience that people find on the iDevice, and a lot of customers value that experience. (Personally, I don't, but I'm exactly 1 customer opinion.)
I think that mobile computing finally found success in iOS and its copy-cats due to the thoughtful simplification of the UI/UX. Desktops are by nature a different beast, and 15 years of translating the desktop UX to the tablet/mobile was a failure until Apple re-designed what mobile UX should be in the first iPhone.
Your thinking is clearly a programmers view, not an end-users. Which is why you, and most programmers, desperately need UX designer help on your projects.
I just bought a Nexus 7 2nd gen off the internet. I was blown away how little Google understands good UX/UI, and the need of the OS to be user-centric in allocating resources. The device while sporting very fast a quad core 1.5 Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM, has the slowest user response I've ever seen. It was 4-8 times slower at responding to user touch, and in UI transitions the a 2 year old iPad2, despite having 3-4 times the hardware resources! I had to drop the idea of supporting Android in our app, because I can't even get acceptable behavior on Google's own super-tablet.
This type of thinking, that has programmers worrying about geeky things like what kind of multi-tasking they have or whether they can root the device, has kept Android from focusing on what is #1 importance: the user. And while I have no doubt the Android will take the majority of the marketshare with poor-performing low-cost devices and Google and Amazon selling quality hardware below cost because they have ulterior motives... in the end the market will suffer because Android is being driven primarily by least common denominator market politics and a programmer-centric point of view.