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Google Releases Android N Developer Preview 2
An anonymous reader writes: Google on Wednesday released the second developer preview of Android N. The update, which comes a month after the release of first Android N developer preview, brings with it a number of features and improvements. On a blog post, Google wrote that it is adding Vulkan, a low-overhead graphics API to the package. This would supposedly offload some CPU-bound processes to GPU. Also in the build are new "human-looking" emojis. Improvements can be found here.
When do they typically give the version it's official name? May I suggest Nutter Butter.
So we've got "Vulkan is a new 3D rendering API", something I'd consider part of a normal update for an OS. A point or two later I read "[w]e are introducing a new emoji design for people emoji that moves away from our generic look".
I am amazed that these two updates would be applied to the same infrastructure.
Seriously. The simple yellow circle with expressions are perfect because the are nonspecific and can be assumed to apply to everyone.
Now we are adding skin tone... Why? That just opens the door to people complaining about hair color, hair style, eye color, face shape and a ton of other things.
Where is the identical set of emojis for people wearing an eye patch. Left or right eye? Scars? Bald people? Glasses? People who lost their noses in tragic plastic surgery incidents?
They have family emojis. Where is the mixed race family? Same Gender couple? Family with 2 boys, family with 2 girls. How about the family with 4 boys, 2 girls a parrot and a lama?
Specificity is not always helpful.
This is progress. Soon we'll all have our own emojis, and the massive amount of data involved will improve server and server hard drive sales.
Exactly. Congrats, designers, your emoji have now crossed into the uncanny valley, with all the negative ramifications thereof. Some of them still retain the traditional yellow color but now have noses, hair, clothes, etc, and it just looks creepy, like watered-down Simpsons characters designed not to cause any offense. Others are colored more "realistically", and now look like drawings from a child's picture book, and rather bland ones at that.
Not that this is worth getting irritated or worried about... I just think it's amusing that this is actually a "feature" that's being touted. The addition of the Vulkan rendering API seems a hell of a lot more interesting.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Is there anything available to run this on, even a "developer model"? I just need VZW (all there is in this county), root, removable battery, and SD slot.
You bring up a really good point. It isn't just Android that's affected, either. It's all sorts of software. Windows. GNOME. Firefox. Even Linux (thanks to systemd).
I no longer look to new releases of such software with interest and excitement. I look to them with dread!
In the past, each new release of software generally improved it in some significant way. We'd be able to do more, without sacrificing any functionality. Often we'd be able to do stuff a lot faster.
Life got easier and better when we jumped from, say, Windows NT 4 to Windows 2000. Our browsing experience improved when Firefox went from version 2 to version 3. GNOME 2 was much better than GNOME 1. Debian 5 offered a much better Linux distribution than Debian 4 did.
Now it's the complete opposite. Each upgrade of such software causes numerous problems. In the case of Windows and GNOME, the UI gets harder and less efficient to use. In the case of Firefox we often find that useful functionality has been removed and unwanted functionality forced on us. In the case of Linux, we find that systemd has subsumed some new functionality, but does it in a way that's problematic and full of issues.
It shouldn't be this way. And for decades it wasn't! I don't know if there's any correlation, but things really started to go downhill around 2005 to 2007, when hipster/Millennial developers started getting involved with the industry. Each generation before them improved on the work of their predecessors. But then the hipsters/Millennials came along and intentionally disregarded all of the knowledge and experience that previous generations had accumulated.
I hope that the next generation of developers, when they eventually come along, do the right thing and throw out everything that the hipsters/Millennials have put together. It's all junk. We'd be all better off if the next generation of developers goes back to where we were in 2005, and builds off of that instead.
Good. Now that's out of the way perhaps they can work on restoring the Android SDK command line based tutorial.
BTW, am I the only one who thinks that the new Gradle build system is a blasted monstrosity ?
I'm an Android guy who whines about it often, being a fan doesn't mean you think things are infallible.
So with that said:
I've been using this OS for over 5 years now, is it even possible at this point to improve the 'backend' core code? The UI continues to be, mildly sluggish in some situations, even on modern hardware. /swap or storage or whatever. By the time you can see the screenshot, process in your brain where you want to click and move your hand there, it's loaded seemlessly behind it. - Clever things like this should be in Android.
I read an article years ago, that Apple 'cheats' with speed stuff, in clever ways. One example, when you quit an app, it takes a silent screenshot of the app. Next time you re-open that application, it calls the screenshot quickly, while loading the real app from
On a larger scale, can the issue of updates ever be solved? Unless you buy a stock google device (I don't like them, sorry) then you're utterly boned. Updates need to come from google, then passed to your handset manufacturer, then passed to your carrier and finally you. OFTEN this breaks down and updates are either delayed or simply don't occur.
As someone without coding skill, is there *any* way this can be addressed? How can google bypass the handset manufacturer? Can they? It's becoming a worse and worse situation.
I still use an ipad and iphone as my spare, I can't deny - I love that updates for 2,3,4 year old phones still get pushed down the line and despite some claims of performance issues baked in to these updates, personally I'm not seeing them.
I like Android, quite a bit - but man do I wish it were faster. Since I've started using it on a HTC HD2,till now, it's still not quick enough, even with bloat disabled and animations turned off.
I feel like Google is focusing on stupid shit now (emojis) rather than important stuff. The days of clever innovation seem gone.
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That just opens the door to people complaining
That seems like a pretty good justification for never doing anything. Seriously who cares? Let them complain ... just like you are right now. If they do nothing somebody complains, if they do something somebody complains.
Specificity is not always helpful.
And sometimes it is, if you don't need it then just use the simple yellow ones.
The latest update has broken even more apps. Already things like Skype or anything that used audio functions, had stopped working. Now various other things have stopped, only spitting out error messages that cover the screen.
I'm about ready to erase the phone and go back to Marshmallow.
Sig for hire.
Bluetooth LE is broken, taking a photo in portrait is broken, I mean WTF
Some 3rd party Android nightlies where messy, but this easily beats everything so far. At least they were frequent and easily revertible if needed.
Trying to load the factory images is broken as well if you did not already unlock your bootloader, because unlocking you bootloader is broken as well.
Really Google... WTF
... really?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
And yet, there is still no effort on Android's part to fix IPv6 so it's usable for companies.
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=32621
This has existed for FOUR YEARS. There are numerous highly rated rants on youtube about this issue. Google doesn't fix it on the simple basis that it doesn't "fit their ecosystem". They're basically pulling a Microsoft here.
I mean, shit. Human like emojis?
Fuck you, Google.
I can't wait until Tizen or something else becomes available. Maybe I'll get a land line.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers