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Comment by i_am_ralpht | Hacker News Reader

I love the way Material Design looks, but I think there's still a way to go with how it responds to input. I made a prototype last weekend of a more fluid Floating Action Button:

http://iamralpht.github.io/fab

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I love it also, but as someone who has owned a Nexus 10 for almost two years, I really don't think I can justify another Android tablet. From an app perspective, unlike the android phone experience, you feel second class all the time. From Facebook to Twitter, the Android tablet version of those apps are just terrible.

Amazon apparently has some war with google over its Fire line and making Fire more attractive than Google products, so we'll never get Prime Video on the Android tablet. Little things like the in-flight video on Southwest doesn't work with android (although they give you hilariously outdated instructions to use an android device with flash installed). I have a little remote control Romo robot I use to videochat with my infant son when I'm at work, and they gave up on their android app. Every startup launches an iOS app that's solid and good looking with a "coming soon" Android app that either never gets here or is a goddamn mess.

That's on top of the other tomfoolery with the N10 like the random battery drains and random reboots, although this might just be old age. I just don't feel the Android tablet experience is there yet and considering Apple's dominance in this area, it may never be there. Developers just aren't making it a priority and often we just get a stretched out phone app, if we get anything. Its shameful how little this has changed in the past couple years.

>we'll never get Prime Video on the Android tablet

You can now but it requires some user intervention.

Amazon's video app can't be installed via the Play store for whatever reason but, if you select a video in the main Amazon app, it asks you to sideload the video app by enabling non-store apps for a bit. Install it an everything works as expected.

Yep, it works great.

> Amazon's video app can't be installed via the Play store for whatever reason

Amazon has their own Android app store that they're pushing very aggressively. When you selected the video in the Amazon app, it actually brought you to the Amazon app store to download the video app. You have to enable side-loading because the Amazon app store isn't the Play store: it's not allowed to install stuff.

This is why it was a good idea to launch the N7 first - N7 is "close-enough" to phone-size that phone-scaled apps appearing aren't jarringly awful, as long as they support landscape rotation.

I think you'll find once demand progresses there'll be homebrew applications to spoof access for Prime Video.

This is really nice. Is this workflow, creating new interactions by dragging the circle, an official Material Design thing?

Circle masks are part of Material Design, but I haven't seen anything with draggable Floating Action Buttons (prior to making this). Obviously they've had a draggable circle for the insecure lock screen for a while, but (to me) it never felt as good.

As I mentioned in the notes, Facebook Home was my main inspiration for this work. It's kind of a mash-up of that and Material...

While i like the animation, the fact that you have to "drag" your finger over the screen, to "tap" on a button, seems weird to me.

Nice ideas. The 'undo' gesture is still a little bit too 'allowing' to me. I mean the point where I switch from selected-contact to alternative-contact is a bit too obscure. Plus the animated circles are a too heavy on the user at that point. A more discrete animation would ensure the intent is right. The visual lingo for going forward could be different to help discrimate.

This is really impressive! Do you mind sharing the js source up on a repo?

Here's the source https://github.com/iamralpht/iamralpht.github.io/tree/master... although it's not terribly beautiful...

Thanks! Regarding the copyright - would that be alright if I use parts of it on a project as long as I attribute the source to you?

My bad, I updated it with APSLv2. If that's no good then send me an email (my address is in the page) and we can figure something out. Happy hacking!

It's WebkitCSSMatrix dependent. Did you even try to make it work with one of the polyfills for CSSMatrix so it would work on Firefox?

Sorry, I didn't try any polyfills; I had a few hours on a weekend and compatibility wasn't on my list. I did do that for a previous project[1] and it was more work than I had time for. I'd love it if Firefox included a CSSMatrix implementation, it's incredibly useful. That and a method to get the absolute transform of an element including all the fiddly transform-origin stuff would be wonderful (I remember roc talking about something like this, but don't remember what happened).

[1]: https://github.com/iamralpht/tboard a spelling game for my kids, inspired by the worksheets they get at school.

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