Gaug.es for Android

github.com

31 points·hecticjeff··2 comments

"Gaug.es for Android is built on top of the awesome Gaug.es API as well as several great projects for Android development that are also available on GitHub:

JakeWharton/ActionBarSherlock for a consistent, great looking header across all Android platforms.

JakeWharton/Android-ViewPagerIndicator for being able to swipe between content, traffic, and referrer pages.

JakeWharton/NineOldAndroids for the AirTraffic view animations.

jayway/android-maven-plugin for building the app and running the integration and unit tests."

A fine demonstration for how important Jake Wharton's work is for the Android community. If you want to use modern Android design patterns across older platform versions, it is hard ignore his projects.

His work also highlights the lack of support given by Google for backwards compatibility. Stuff like action bar (one of the biggest new UI changes in 3.0+) backwards compatibility is essential if you design your app around the new patterns and guidelines. Their official recommendations for having an action bar in 2.3 and below are:

1. Reimplement almost the whole action bar on 2.3 and below by building on top of their "ActionBarCompat" example which is very minimal and only supports menu items - if developers take this approach, there's going to be a lot of inconsistent action bars out there.

2. Just forget the action bar on older versions of Android (http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/01/say-goodbye-t...), which is terrible advice - you can't just pretend that it never existed when the whole app is designed around it. Thankfully they don't believe this themselves since all their apps have some sort of action bar implementation on older versions too.

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