That’s not what Android 4.0 looks like. The YouTube icon is just one more relic left over from the old Android, and I’m not a fan of those.

But looking at old Android screenshots today showed me exactly why I feel it’s so out of place: the icon’s light gray background reminds me of (and, likely, was designed for) an Android that looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/ym4W4.png

A while back, I complained about the design of the YouTube icon, saying that it “doesn’t fit in with the general Ice Cream Sandwich theme”. I didn’t say why, and so a few people thought it was a baseless complaint.

The leftmost and rightmost buttons in the toolbar aren’t centered in their tap areas. This is one of the issues with surrounding the whole area around a button in blue: it requires a more complex layout to ensure it is balanced. Here, it might not be easy to solve this issue without a dead zone in the toolbar; perhaps the blue highlight could be centered even if the tap area is not.

This here is during the “back” transition from the page showing data usage details for a specific app. The issue here is the big gap you can make out between the list and the graph: while the list animates in with a gap between it and the graph, the graph doesn’t start moving down to fill that gap until after the back animation completes. This doesn’t feel right: the graph should either move down during the back animation, or the list should appear directly underneath the graph and have both move down together afterwards.

Apparently that “Save to” item is to add the video to a playlist. Not sure how you are supposed to find that out in the UI, though: I thought it might even have been about saving the video to the phone itself. Could easily fix this by having it say “Save to playlist” or something similar.

Missing a period/full stop in this alert. Could also be improved by stating why it failed, but that might not always be possible.

Update: Apparently you cannot swipe the music notification off, so the X is required. But why should you not be able to swipe it off? I don’t see the benefit in having a separate UI for this one type of notification. And, of course, the pause button does the same thing as the X: stop the music and dismiss the notification.

I can’t figure out what the X button is for on the Music notification. Sure, it closes it and stops the music, but so does a sideways swipe on the notification. Why is there an extra button here, when the standard method works just fine?

However, at this point, and even with the check box as shown, that is still disabled. You actually have to tap again to enable auto-loading of images: the check mark, apparently, only means that you tapped to show photos this time (regardless of the text next to it). Incredibly confusing.

This shows the Gmail app, just after tapping to show images in an email. As you can see, it appears that I have now enabled showing images for all emails from this address.

ICS Paper Cuts sucks. </big loud bold font>

Notice I’m not saying I think it sucks, or saying I have issues with the content and misinformation, I’m saying it’s crap and you must agree.

Firstly here, I’m not a professional UI designer. I’m not a designer at all, actually. I’m much better at hacking away on some backend low-level code than writing about UIs. But I do like good UI, and while Android 4.0 is a huge step forward from past versions of Android, I have no trouble saying that it has plenty of issues.

I’m going to disagree, of course. (I wouldn’t post it here if I thought it was crap.) But, really, wow. I’m not going to force you to agree with me, but I’d at least like you to see my opinions here. Because that’s what this blog is: my opinions.

What, exactly, is a “Mediaserver”? Why do I care?

Is it very intuitive in this list? Nope. And that’s OK.

Which is exactly what I’m complaining about. At least we agree there. But, to me, as a user with a Galaxy Nexus trying to find how to improve battery life, I’m confused. I’m perfectly fine with a switch that shows all processes here, but I just don’t think this is a sane default.

Welcome to widgets

Actually, it takes just two motions here. One tap to open the drawer, another to tap the “Widgets” tab up top there. There’s an argument to be made for Paul’s suggestion – Google loves swiping left and right now as well – just check out the Android Market. But there definitely could be confusion with that in the app drawer.

That wasn’t actually my point, although reading my post I can see how someone might get confused. My issue here is that the launcher’s paging involves multiple (in fact, a variable number) of swipes to switch tabs. Nowhere else on Android is this required; everywhere else simply uses one swipe to switch one tab.

Long Button is Long

If your e-mail address was “jerry.hildenbrand@androidcentral.com,” you would. Seeing the full text in a list (you can have more than one Gmail account) comes in handy.

My issue is not that there is text up there filling the whole width, it’s that the actual tappable area for the button — the part shown as blue in my screenshot — is too big. I still think this. (I’d actually go as far as to say that the “Recents” shown by pressing there (along with Labels) would do better a level up in the app’s hierarchy. Then, you could put search in the upper right (like the Market) and only “New Mail” and “Refresh” at the bottom — fixing Danny Sullivan’s issue in the process.)

Twitter is not Android

Dropbox also is not Android

No, but the screenshot I posted is rendered by Android. Twitter doesn’t include the Android 2.0 graphical design in their apps, the system supplies it because Twitter hasn’t enabled the new design. Backwards compatibility, sure, but Android is still weak in the design space. Now is not the time to sacrifice usability and consistency for slow-moving app developers.

Spelling it out for you

“Siri: What is Wi-Fi direct.” It’s also covered in the Android 4.0 platform highlights, where people might look to see the advanced features of their new smartphone. And certainly the people in the store selling you your new phone could tell you. Any of these options is preferable to a multipage description that explains the Wi-Fi direct protocol and its capabilities, don’t you think?

Are you really trying to defend “Start Wi-Fi Direct Operation” as the best message that could appear here? Here’s a better one, to start: “Enable Wi-Fi Direct communication with other devices? This will disable normal Wi-Fi connections.”

Tabbing with tabs

And he’s right – they do look a little different. And he’s right – they do look a little different. And we agree […] that we’d like to see a little more consistency between Google apps. But Paul’s wrong when he says you can’t tap on them to switch tabs. Like on the Widgets tab in the app drawer, we have to wonder if he even bothered to try.

The tap targets are tiny. If you are going to try and tap on them, they should be somewhat taller than half the height of any other UI element, no? But I’m glad you agree that more consistency would be good.

Because that’s really all I’m going for here: maybe — since Android is open-source, so even if nobody at Google ever sees this blog — this will make Android better. And that’d be good.

And, not to enter another raging argument, but I think this what John Gruber meant when he said that “you either see it or you don’t.” It really doesn’t look like Jerry Hildenbrand sees it here.