Google should do this for regular Android APIs. The frequency you have to look up special-android-things is stunning –> disrupts your flow = very bad<p>There are way too many things you have to keep in your head on Android to get things right (<a href="https://developer.android.com/guide/components/images/activity_lifecycle.png" rel="nofollow">https://developer.android.com/guide/components/images/activi...</a>). The approach Google took here - do what ever you want, we won't tell/force you, is pure wrong (I'm a bit exaggerating, but still).<p>Developers wasted millions of hours of dev-time and therefor money to figuring out how to do basic things, like saving application state when the device is rotated or another app comes to foreground (testing state-changes is also complicated). There were complains about how state-saving is handled, but Google ignored them for many many years. Every platform has good and bad points, acknowledged, but not having a clear-line, a way how things should be done, is to me indecisive leadership and a very big mistake I would not have expected from Google.<p>Last AndroidIO things got better with the introduction of so called "Architecture Components" (among other things a SQLite ORM and guide how basic things should be done, finally). I wonder what took them so long.
Google has some of the worst UI/UX. For all the other great stuff they do, this is one area where they really shouldn't be teaching others but learning from them.<p>From the barely usable Gsuite admin console to the indecipherable API docs (and developer console), I can't think of a single product where I can intuitively find the setting or option I'm looking for.
Funny this should come up - This past month I've been exploring building web apps using <a href="http://www.material-ui.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.material-ui.com/</a>. They have some of the best documentation I've ever seen for a front end framework. Easy code examples right in the component that you can play with and then peek at the source code.<p>It makes such a difference to be able to see the output and then quickly look at the source code. Really wonderful development experience.
I'm glad that Google is thinking along these lines - as an amateur coder, I often find the UX of some of their products (e.g. AppEngine, YouTube API) terrible, often related to documentation not actually being comprehensive enough.<p>And further, if only the Pandas team would also think about this a little more - surely the most frustrating, least intuitive module I've ever had the misfortune to encounter in Python.
Never heard of Flutter (<a href="https://flutter.io/" rel="nofollow">https://flutter.io/</a>) till now. I hope the project succeeds. I just don't think React Native is the way forward. And native everywhere is just costly for smaller teams/solo devs. All the best to Flutter!
Given the increasingly poor state of some of Google's biggest properties (YouTube is a prime offender, its user experience only ever seems to get worse) I'm obviously surprised to hear this.
This is rich coming from Google. If only they put a fraction of the time they put into this into the Android SDK they'd have a much better product.
my favorite google ux story is that the "ux study" behind drive.google.com switching to some weird, pseudo filesystem with double click to open (in a webpage!) was based on a user study with 12, twelve, participants. half of them were not completely dumbfounded by a web page that required you to double click to interact with an element. not completely dumbfounded meant that they either clicked twice initially (2 IIRC), or clicked once, waited fewer than 5 seconds, and then tried double clicking.<p>the big joke, at least while I was there, was that ux for random tools kept changing because they kept hiring ux engineers who needed to change something, anything, just to get promoted.
This[1] was linked to in the post.<p>I've been playing around with flutter, and saw a lot of code similar to this. Where is this style from? I've written apps in Java for Android but never encountered such style.<p>The post refers to this as problematic because developers fail to map the code spatially. While I agree, I also find this kind of code very unreadable and unelegant. I'm interested in what others think. Isn't this a part of the UX? It becomes a bit hard for me to maintain proper context with this way of writing code.<p>[1]: <a href="https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6dcf061bad914e1a0d18653eda789e65#file-row_column-dart" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/anonymous/6dcf061bad914e1a0d18653eda...</a>
My suggestion about the child / children thing: make it more obvious by calling it 'one_child'. Maybe not as beautiful but I guess that > 50% developers don't have English as their native language.