Hipmunk comes to Android with a surprisingly slick app | Hacker News Reader

Hipmunk comes to Android with a surprisingly slick app

gigaom.com

70 pointswallflower19 comments

I don't see why it is surprising. Credit should go to the Hipmunk team, but it isn't like it isn't impossible or even difficult relative to other platforms to make a good looking app on Android. You can argue about how the tools are worse, user expectations are lower, developer community is less design focused or their taste is worse, but I am not surprised a quality team made a quality app.

Android is an important platform, and I am only surprised (and upset) if you make a shit app. If a company can't get it together to make a good Android app, maybe they just aren't a good company.

For another company who has built an awesome android app, look at Gowalla. In my opinion, it's one of the best looking apps period. Yesterday I had both the iOS and Android versions of the app open, and by and large, I'd say the Android won out. (Other than it lacks the cool drag to refresh)

I want to shake the hand of whomever wrote their scrolling list code. I've never seen another Android app do it so smoothly before. There's something to be said for 60fps animations on a mobile device.

I disagree - android apps are more difficult to polish then iPhone apps, for a variety of reasons.

* Bad defaults. (For example, on Android your app will look like crap if you have any gradients, unless you make sure to change the window format to PixelFormat.RGBA_8888 at startup). * Core UI components are ugly and behave poorly * Sluggish performance due to lack of hardware accelerated GUI (especially visible during animations, scrolling, etc) * Extra work to support a variety of screen sizes and input methods (trackball, etc) * Using custom-drawn components on Android that need animation (e.g. SurfaceView) results in inescapable flickering and compositing glitches - and you certainly can't use them properly with transitions. Popular iPhone apps tend to have a lot of UI candy, so this makes it harder to compete.

I'm surprised you're being down voted -- you're making a decent argument and no one's refuting any of your points.

Come on, Hacker News. It's not like sshumaker just posted "omg lol fandroids r dum" -- (s)he backed it up with fairly specific reasons.

Having developed for both Android and iOS, I totally agree.

It will definitely be big news when a major Android app is noticeably better than its iOS counterpart.

I don't see why they are surprised...Hipmunk's main appeal to users is the slick UI...without it, they might as well use Orbitz

The app looks really nice. Only feedback is some labels are some airline labels are missing on the search results (G2, Gingerbread).

My feedback is more specific to Hipmunk in general. I want to use and love it but the prices have been off each time I try. For instance on jetblue.com right now I can get a ticket for tomorrow JFK -> AUS at 9:30AM for $423 but on Hipmunk it's $797. I'm guessing you might be pulling the price by flight time and not flight number. There is another flight leaving at 9:30 which is $797.

That was probably a pricing update. It's one of the really annoying things that plagues everyone in this space. I see the fare on us for $434 now (which is $423 after taxes).

http://www.hipmunk.com/#!JFK.AUS,Sep30

Ah, that is quite a plague. Thanks for the info.

If you want to give quick feedback, the dev posted on the Android subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/kva3g/hipmunk_for_a...

I'm actually keeping an eye on this post as well so feel free to post feedback here.

Quick feedback. I find the return date selection to be non-intuitive. There is no clear indicator (on my screen) how to specify the return date. Tapping the screen and did the trick, but there was no indicator that said tapping the calendar again would choose the return date.

I completely agree now that you mention it. One of those things where you take it for granted but it isn't clear by default to everyone. On our website we have a highlight that indicates what your next click will do, and I think something to this effect will help on Android as well.

In the grid that displays the flights and fares, scrolling up or down with a swipe results in a little bit of horizontal scrolling as well. Really distracting!

When it said Hipmunk, I thought it was talking about the Haskell bindings (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Hipmunk) to the chipmonk physics library. I got all exited thinking that someone had made a great haskell app for android.

A lot of the new ticket vendors on Hipmunk only accept US cards. I would love to see an option to filter them out, it makes the slick Hipmunk UI totally pointless if I have to go through by hand and check which vendors are available for each flight.

Although I do think it's a nicely done app, I have to question its utility.

Not Hipmunk itself, just the mobile part. Is there really a large market for looking up flights on-the-go? I mean, if you're spending a couple hundred/thousand dollars on traveling somewhere, surely you'd think about it for long enough to break out a laptop before purchasing, right?

Or is there some other use to this that I'm not considering?

Congratulations on a successful launch. The app is a great addition to the awesomeness of Hipmunk.

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