On Friday, June 1, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Mark Murphy wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 2:51 PM, Andrew Toulouse
> <toulo...@crunchyroll.com (mailto:toulo...@crunchyroll.com)> wrote:
> > Being able to force a tab bar (the one that shows on space-constrained devices)
> > Having a differently-styled tab bar (the same sort as above) with respect to height
> > Being able to have two nested levels of tabs
> > Letting tabs loop around

> > The last one is probably more of a ViewPager-related issue more than an ActionBar one.

> The primary point behind the action bar pattern is to provide a
> consistent navigation experience, across apps, for the user. In this
> respect, Google is taking the "carrot" approach, in contrast with
> Apple's "stick" (i.e., you violate their human interface guidelines
> and you cannot distribute your app).

> Android developers have a well-earned reputation of caring not a whit
> about a consistent navigation experience, or much of a consistent
> *anything* when it comes to UI/UX. As a result, Android developers are
> ridiculed by users and the media for writing "lousy" apps. It's not so
> much that the apps themselves are lousy, but that they do not look
> like they belong with the other apps on the device, and "different"
> tends to be perceived as "lousy" unless the UI is truly excellent.

> Is Google's action bar implementation perfect? Far from it. That being
> said, developers really need to either go with the action bar as
> implemented (and as backported in ABS) or do something sufficiently
> visually different that users are not comparing it to a regular action
> bar. Developers who fall in the "uncanny valley" of something that
> kinda looks like an action bar but behaves differently are at greater
> risk of having their apps perceived as "lousy".

> Hence, I am a big fan of Jake's approach of keeping ABS as a pure
> backport, functionality-wise.

> This is not to say that innovation is bad. However, for every
> developer who is innovating on the action bar, there needs to be 100,
> maybe even 1,000, who are sticking with the standard one, to help lift
> Android's app reputation out of the hole that it is in. Android
> developers need to learn discipline: stick to standards where users
> expect standards, and innovate where users expect innovation. And, for
> better or for worse, Google has moved its implementation of the action
> bar into the "where users expect standards" category.

> --
> Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)
> http://commonsware.com | http://github.com/commonsguy
> http://commonsware.com/blog | http://twitter.com/commonsguy

> _The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development_ Version 3.7 Available!