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Comment by joebadmo | Hacker News Reader

The thing that really stands out to me about ICS is the focus on user experience. Duarte seems to have addressed all the little complaints I've always had, and some I never realized I had.

* Moving away from long-presses.

* More consistent app navigation via swipes.

* More usable but still powerful task management/switching.

* Better representation of useful data like contacts and calendars.

* Order of magnitude better camera app, faster, cleaner, with extremely easy sharing built in.

Apparently the UI is finally hardware accelerated as well (though apps have to opt-in), so hopefully it means an end to Android's historically jittery interface.

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The hardware acceleration opt-in is just one line in the AndroidManifest.xml file, so it should be widely adopted.

Of course, they would have made it a default if it didn't have some incompatibilities; and looking into it a little more deeply, it does look like there may be:

http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/03/android-30-ha...

Well hopefully once the issues are worked out, future versions will be opt-out instead.

The opt-in is basically saying, that either recommended or minimum OS version for your app is Ice Cream Sandwich. You do not switch the acceleration on or off, you say in the manifest, that you are aware of the platform.

There's also an override in the Dev menu to force GPU acceleration for all apps. It also strangely makes the emulator significantly smoother.

It's actually enabled by default on Android 4.0. It's optional only in Honeycomb.

It depends on your targetSdk. It can't be enabled by default because it breaks a lot of apps.

You're currently downvoted, but you're correct. Apps targetting older sdks will need to opt-in to make use of the acceleration, even on ICS. But it's an easy switch to flip, assuming it doesn't cause visual glitches, which it can in some cases.

It's a huge improvement and I'm very excited for it. One issue I have with it, though, is that I was hoping they'd make the virtual buttons appear "on demand" somehow, so you can take advantage of the "full" screen in all situations. But even better, they should've done something like in Meego Harmatan, where you go "back" or to the home page by sliding the screen to the side.

That could create an issue in games perhaps, if not done right, but they could've probably found a way to do it right. Matias himself says gestures are better than buttons, so he should've tried to get rid of those buttons completely, too. Then you could enjoy the full screen in all situations, and you could use the full "HD" resolution. Oh well, maybe they can implement it for Android 5.0 (right, Matias? - if you're reading this).

I believe this happens for video playback at least in the default setup. I'd imagine CyanogenMod etc. could make it happen for any other app (since they don't have the screen size hardcoded).

I love how they copied the people UI and the addressbook from Windows Phone. Good ideas are to be copied. Thanks for bringing them to android.

Swiping away the notifications too. :)

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