Entries for month: “November 2010”
My Impressions of the Samsung Galaxy Tab
I am working on a interface for an Adobe Air app that is intended to run on the Samsung Galaxy Tablet. So this weekend I set out to find a Galaxy Tab that I can play with to see how it works. I was especially interested in testing the interactions of some of the other Android applications. I have a few tricky things to address myself, I needed to see how others worked around them.
I found the Galaxy Tab at a local Verizon store, and after a quick introduction to it by the sales guy I was off and swiping. I spent all of 45-55 min playing with the device. Not enough to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but enough to formulate some opinions about it none the less.
Overall, I thought the device was well constructed. It felt good in my hands. I liked the high quality screen the most. It was bright and vivid. the built in icons all looked great. Of course it looked as though some of them were apple derivatives. My first impressions were really good and I thought wow this might actually be a cool device. But then I spent another 40+ minutes with it. That's when things went downhill.
What I don't like about the Galaxy Tab
My biggest complaints about the device was the fact that all the applications I demoed relied on the devices primary back button to navigate applications. Some apps even used it as a way of saying "done" bringing up a save or cancel dialogue prompt. This feels so wrong to me to have to leave the application window to click a button to go back a step or to say done. What were the developers thinking? To make matters worse, if you are using the tablet in the landscape mode the back and home buttons no longer communicate what they do. Take a look at this screenshot. The home button now looks like a backwards arrow, and the back button looks like an undo button or something else.
I'm sure you will get used to the oddly oriented icons after a while, but shouldn't these devices be intuitive and easy for anyone to understand? Samsung could have remedied this glaring issue buy rotating these icons when the tablet was turned to on it's side. I am actually more of the opinion that most users will use this device primarily in the portrait position so it may not matter much. In the end it's a horrible design and bad user experience.
That brings me to my second gripe. Holding the device in the landscape position was difficult. Mostly because it didn't feel right in landscape mode. This is probably fine for gaming or watching videos, but for most other tasks portrait felt much more comfortable to me. I found hat even though I was trying to test the device in landscape mode I kept turning it to portrait without even thinking about it. It was a subconscious move that I was doing based on how the device felt to me.
What about Adobe Flash?
Since the application that I am working on is going to be an Adobe Air App, I decided to test the flash capability. I tested several sites known to use flash. I tried youtube, CBS, and a few sites that I have worked on that use flash for some elements of flash. Sadly, the video on CBS did not want to play at first. Then after trying another, the video finaly did play but was not very smooth. Testing sites that used flash for some elements made the page a bit sluggish to scroll. Sadly, the animation playback was also not all that smooth either. Personally, I just don't think that flash is going work that great on this device in the long run. If you really want flash on your portable, you might want to hold off on the Galaxy Tab. Perhaps the Blackberry Playbook will be a better platform for Flash.
→ Respond NowTags: Opinions & Rants
Fixing Photoshop's Shape Tool
Have you ever used the vector shape tools only to discover that the edges can sometimes look aliased? To make matters worse, sometimes you could draw a shape and it would turn out nice. Sometimes it looks like poop. The tool is so inconsistent and frustrating that I actually recommended that interface designers stop using the tool all together.
The problem with these tools are that the default (horrible default) behavior for the tool is to use a sub-pixel placement on the screen. What I mean by "sub-pixel" is that drawing a vector shape can actually split a pixel in half. When the pixel becomes split like that then it has to alias the shape in order to compensate for the split pixel. Contrast that to a marquee tool. When a marquee tool draws a shape it snaps to the nearest full pixel creating sharp edges that appear crisp and clean. Lets take a look at what this looks like.
The fix for this shortcoming is pretty easy. Although it may be a bit hidden. With the shape tool active (U) select the rectangle or rounded rectangle shape tool, then look towards the end of shape options there is a disclosure triangle. If you click on it, you will be shown options available for that tool. For each of those tools there is a checkbox that reads "Snap to Pixels" checking that box will allow the vector shapes to snap to the nearest whole pixel curing the sub-pixel display issues. In the photo above. The right shape was drawn with Snap to Pixels box checked, while the left shape was not checkeded. What a difference it makes. Why dosen't Adobe make that the default for the tool?
→ Respond NowTags: Photoshop
