Noted iPhone Jailbreak developer Grant Paul, better known as chpwn, has started the ICS Paper Cuts blog to share his thoughts on user interface and user experience inconsistencies in Google’s latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.

Android Central‘s Jerry Hildenbrand has responded, agreeing with some of Paul’s complaints and calling him out on others, and Paul has now responded to Hildenbrand’s response as well. It’s a great discussion and an important one and hopefully we’ll see more like it across sites and platforms. UI and UX are iterative processes and criticism is the fuel that feeds iteration.

Consistency is something I’ve harped on as well, both here on TiPb and on the Iterate podcast.

While iOS has more than it’s fair share of UI eccentricities — stitched leather and felt come immediately to mind — it has by and large provided a more consistent experience than Android to date. The same type of control is typically in the same approximate place from one Apple app to another, and many — though certainly not all — iOS designers take pains and pride in following the same conventions. Like chopping wood, or reading repetitive words, it causes the chrome to disappear and interactions to become near frictionless.

Google has stepped up their design game across the board over the last year, but it remains challenged by legacy apps and interface elements, and a culture that traditionally places engineering ahead of design.

2012 represents a new opportunity for both platforms, however, with iOS 6 and Android Jellybean (Jujube? Jaffa cake? Jawbreaker?) on the horizon. Let’s see what they can do.

Meanwhile check out the discussion via the links below.

Source: ICS Paper Cuts, Android Central response, ICS Paper Cuts reponse

Facebook have begun to roll out their new profile design: Timeline, to iPhone through the mobile optimized version of their website. The redesign features most of the important features of Timeline.

• Viewing and changing Cover Images.
• Scrolling back through time – from birth to the present day

Other features are missing, like the ability to add ‘life events’, or change the date of photos to have them listed accurately in your timeline, but overall the interface is really nice.

The new timeline interface is only viewable on profiles that have enabled them on the normal website. Timeline hasn’t rolled out on the iPad, or the native app, but no doubt it will be soon.

Source: m.facebook.com

Fairly or unfairly, Google’s Android often gets knocked for having a lagging or stuttering user interface when compared to Apple’s iOS on iPhone and iPad. TiPb’s previously guessed that this stemmed from very early architectural decisions made by Apple, who had a full screen, multi-touch UI — albeit it a highly limited one — in mind from the outset, as opposed to Google who originally had Android set up as a BlackBerry, Windows Mobile Standard, and Nokia competitor that had no need for high performance, sophisticated UI rendering.

That might turn out to be pretty much the case. In response to a Google+ post about hardware acceleration by Android engineer Dianne Hackborn, ex-Google intern Andrew Munn breaks down why Android’s way of handling graphics and event processing hinders the OS from offering users a more fluid, lag-free UI.

Android UI will never be completely smooth because of the design constraints I discussed at the beginning:

• UI rendering occurs on the main thread of an app
• UI rendering has normal priority

The iPhone changed things by introducing a dedicated thread with high priority for handling UI rendering, redirecting all power (CPU and GPU) to handling UI element rendering in realtime based on touch input. The result? Smooth-as-butter UI elements, transitions and animations as soon as you touch the screen — even on older hardware when paired with the latest iOS 5 software. The drawback: everything else, from app downloads to content rendering will pause so the UI can keep that high frame rate, high quality redraw pace.

Munn does disclose that he was only an intern with Google’s Android team and never actually got his hands on the raw Android source code, so this could be taken as supposition.

Indeed, our own resident Mobile Nations Android guru, Jerry Hildenbrand from Android Central says there might be a bit more to it:

The way it stands now, as long as you have free resources to run multiple UI threads [in Android] the UI is amazingly smooth — easily as smooth as the iPhone or WP7 phones. Problem is that nobody sets resource management up in a way to keep them free. A simple customization to the linux lowmemkiller kernel parameter fixes it, at the expense of huge memory hogs like Facebook or HTC applications. One day, when we have Octocore 12NM Cpu’s, DDR3 RAM, and huge batteries this way will prove better. For now, you have to hack at it.

So Android can be set up to prioritize UI, if that’s what’s wanted, but it’s not automatic like iOS. That might annoy user experience snobs, like our friends on the Iterate podcast but it might be a fine tradeoff for those with other priorities, like the big screens, different skins, and high customizability that Android’s design does allow.

Hit the source for a full technical breakdown.

Source: Dianne Hackborn, Andrew Munn

Marc Edwards of Bjango, and co-host of our Iterate podcast, has put up some pro tips and tricks on exporting iPhone, iPad, and other UI elements from Photoshop.

It’s probably the least interesting part of designing software, usually entailing hours of grinding. Saving images to multiple scales — as required by iOS and other platforms — adds complication to the process. However, there are ways to streamline or automate exporting.

Check out Marc’s article, linked below, so you can get your pixel perfect apps and web sites out of Photoshop and into the hands of users.

[Bjango]

iPad users that use twitter.com in safari, instead of the downloadable iPad app, will be getting a new HTML5 web app in the next few weeks

Currently, iPad users who navigate to ‘twitter.com’ are greeted with the old iPhone layout, with an option to switch to the default desktop UI. However Twitter announced on the ‘Twitter Mobile’ twitter account that they have begun rolling out a new HTML5 based web UI specifically for the iPad, which should reach all users in the coming weeks.

We’ve launched our HTML5 version of twitter.com for iPad. It will be rolling out to device owners over the next week or so.

The screenshot above shows that the UI is similar to both the desktop design and the recently updated iPhone design.

I haven’t had the updated web app yet, but I’m interested to know if any of you have had a chance to play with it yet.

[9to5mac] [@TwitterMobile]

Apple implements an interesting layered user experience in both iOS and OS X. They’ve always done this to some degree; early on with Mac OS X, UNIX gurus could live comfortably in Terminal while those raised on the GUI of classic Mac and Windows would feel right at home in Aqua.

With iOS 4, Apple’s mobile platform added similar layers of user experience. While an expert user could double click home to open up the Fast App Switcher, or hide multiple apps into a single Folder, casual users could keep using the iPhone or iPad perfectly well without ever exposing either of those UI elements. iOS 5 adds Notification Center to the mix. Experts can click and pull and expose greater pro-level features while someone coming from a feature phone can use iPhone as little more than a phone that plays music and takes pictures. And both can be perfectly happy.

OS X Lion even adds an iOS-like upper layer with LaunchPad, so now the UNIX geek in Terminal and the GUI user in Aqua can finally give their parents, kids, and non-computer savvy family and friends an iPad-like app launcher to use, compete with auto-save, restore, and a host of other, far more humane features.

Making computers more and more mainstream is something Apple’s done from Apple II, through Mac, to iPad, and it’s something they’re continuing to invest in for Lion, and iOS 5. And their market share seems to indicate it’s paying off.

There have been some significant UI changes to Notification Center in iOS 5 beta 2, specifically, the way notifications are handled on the Lock Screen. In beta 1, notifications would simply appear as line items, with new notifications stacking as new line items, one after the other. In beta 2, if a single notification comes in, it now gets its own, newly styled popup.

In both cases, you could and can drag the associated app icon to unlock and be taken directly to the app, only the appearance of the first notification has changed. I addition, Apple has added a visible “window shade” UI element, complete with a little “gripper” handle, to the lock screen, above the single notification, so you can pull down the full list of recent notifications.

For alarms, the change is even more striking, as the addition of the “snooze” button seemed bitsy in the beta 1 UI but is now big and bold in the beta 2 UI (see above).

The most interesting part of this is that Apple is still working on, or experimenting with, the notifications user experience during the beta process. During previous iOS releases, the user experience for cut, copy, and paste, and for the multitasking fast app switcher and folders remained relatively unchanged during the beta process. (Though significant changes were made prior to the beta period, when it was still internal to Apple).

We know Apple hired the father of webOS notifications over a year ago, but also hired the developer of Jailbreak notifications just prior to the iOS 5 beta release. What, if any, impact that might be having on the betas is unknown, but it’s tremendous to actually “see” Apple’s design iterations on such a major new feature release.

It seems that Google are slowly implementing a new UI for their web app. The update changes the ‘blue tabs’ at the top of the site to new ‘grey tabs’ with pull down icons. To change the type of search, they’ve updated it to include a drop down grid of all the different search types, and apps, instead of the old text list.

Interestingly, this UI update has only been updated on Web search, Video search, News and Blogs. The older ‘blue’ interface still appears on Image Search, Places, Shopping, Finance, Apps, iGoogle and Books. Google Apps, like GMail, Google Translate, Google Docs and Google Reader haven’t received any form of update either. YouTube has its own mobile web app, and Maps has recently been updated.

Do you like this update on the Google Web App? Do you use the Google Web App?

[Google Mobile]

Android Gripes, which I’m guessing is an homage to the terrific Adobe UI Gripes blog, has posted up some screenshots of iPhone apps side by side with their Android counterparts.

When I use an iPhone and an Android phone at the same time, I often find that apps from the same company look a lot different on these two platforms – the ones on Android usually look much worse.

There are without a doubt some well designed, great looking Android apps (Google makes a lot of them) but it is strange to see the same apps from the same developers simply not as well rendered for Android as they are for iPhone. Either Interface Builder in Xcode is even more magical than the iPad, there’s some constraint in the Android development tools, or Android users simply aren’t demanding the design level they deserve.

(There’s a joke that if an app has an ugly icon, iPhone users won’t download it. That same joke should exist on Android.)

Check out some more example via the link below.

[Android Gripes via @mdflores]

When someone starts writing it’s not unusual for them to want to be creative, to be un-boring, so when they have a character talk, that character “intimates”, “whispers”, “suggests”, “exclaims” and otherwise enjoys every imaginable bit of literary variance the author can throw at them.

More seasoned writers tend to just stick with “said”. When a character talks, it’s “said”, “said”, “said”. Over an over again. Page after page. Turtleneck after jeans. “Said”, “said”, “said”. It’s used so often it just disappears, the mechanics disappear, the author disappears, and all that’s left is the character.

Apple’s iOS has a pretty consistent user interface. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s more consistent than its competitors. Occasional page curl in Maps aside, the basic ways you move around the iPhone are the same, Apple app after Apple app. (And anything that’s not tends to get hidden away so power users can “discover it” and mainstream users can live their lives never having to be bothers by its existence).

iOS is so consistent, so single minded it being consistent, that when it isn’t — especially when 3rd party apps aren’t — it causes problems. Upper left had corner is a virtual back button. Tap and you go back. Tap and you go back. Tap and you… are suddenly editing your account? That’s the type of exception that proves the rule. You’re so used to doing something, it’s so instinctive to do certain things, that when they don’t happen you notice, and you get annoyed.

Beyond the UI it applies to Apple’s platform as well. From 2007 to 2009 every iPhone and iPod touch — 6 devices not counting re-issues — not only ran pretty much the same OS but had pretty much the same specs, the same screens, the same types of chips. When newer, better technology was thrown in — GPS, 3G, faster chips, more RAM, iOS abstracted them through API like CoreLocation so they remained broadly consistent. In 2010 Apple added the iPad which admittedly muddied the consistency waters, but they made sure it could run iPhone apps either 1x or 2x in double fuzzy chunky mode. iPhone 4 quadrupled the resolution but kept the same size so old apps “just worked” with 4 pixels instead of 1 if they had to, and the new gyroscope got hooked up to the old accelerometer and CoreMotion was born.

When speaking of the iPhone and the iPad, Apple SVP of design — and again, how many hardware/software companies have an executive level designer? — said he did everything possible to get the device itself out of the user’s way. It’s just a screen. Apple’s software designers have done a little of the same. But maintaining consistency to such a a consistent degree, a significant part of the OS gets out of the user’s way as well and only the content is left.

Say what you want about the iOS home screen being a boring old app launcher, but it’s always a boring old app launcher, swipe after swipe, page after page. It’s not a card view one moment, app launcher the next, wave in between. It’s not a bank of widgets arrayed like Hong Kong street signs surrounded by empty spaces and the occasional app in between — if they’ve been liberated from the drawer.

iOS consistency is so prevalent it becomes easy to overlook, but just spend a few days with another platform and it you start to realize it almost immediately. Incredible variations in hardware and UI skins are great for varieties sake but usability takes a huge hit.

Just for fun I passed around a few non-iPhone devices to co-workers, all smart techies. It took them a while to do even basic things like turn them on, unlock them, find Wi-Fi and add the password (note: never have two buttons for Wi-Fi one on top of the other where the first one turns it on and off, they’ll hit that one every time while looking for the settings hidden in plain sight beneath it.) I watched in particularly horrible fascination as a friend of my went to Digg’s mobile site, tapped a link, and had the device activate the link below it. He repeated and it did it again. About 4 out of 5 times when he hit pretty much the same spot — a link — it would trigger the one below. And yes, only 4 out of 5 times, just to be inconsistent about the inconsistency. Finding the phone to place a call? Woz wasn’t wrong. It was comedic at times.

In stark contrast I’ve mention numerous time how I’ve given iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads to children as young as one and half and they’ve been able to unlock them and launch the apps they wanted to launch. At two and half they could use it well.

That’s the power of a fairly consistent platform running fairly consistent consistent software.

It’s what Apple has been doing for years, for decades — making software and focusing on human interface (they’ve even got guidelines). It’s why feature checklists might not be the best way to measure advances in the smartphone space (though every June Apple takes as good a jump down checklist street as anyone.)

Microsoft is reportedly laying down the consistency law for partners with the upcoming Windows Phone 7, and rumor has it Google might try to divest itself of all those Android UI skins with version 3.0.

Sure, “power users” might get bored but we complain about everything anyway. People who just want to use their device won’t even notice — they’ll be too busy using their device. Just like readers are too busy enjoying their novel and don’t give a second though to “said”, “said”, said.”

Sebastiaan de With of Cocoia has posted another of his UI roundups, this time focusing on Apple’s evolution of the iPhone interface in the form of the brand new iPad.

He notes the expanded icon size of 72×72, and as-yet-unused 64 and 320 versions, along with more “earthy” metaphors, and since he designed the one for Classics, weighs in on the very similar looking iBooks.

Conversely, he’s not a fan of the new “popover” UI element, calling it kludgy. And feels the repugnant, inconsistent look of the iPad iTunes application takes no advantage of innovations from either the iPhone or Mac, and is a visual punch-in-the-face. He’s also worried that the lack of encouragement for resolution-independance in iPhone app development (though TiPb’s heard Apple does indeed stress that) will make the iPad’s 2x mode a blurry mess.

For our part, TiPb’s wondering how much of these UI changes, good, bad, and ugly will hit the iPhone with either iPhone 3.2, or iPhone 4.0?

What do you think Apple should move over to the iPhone, and what do you hope they keep far, far away?

Wired’s blog picked up a story from iPhone Atlas today about a minor MobileSafari browser UI change that sees the (defaults to Google) search box surfaced right on top beside the URL address box (currently it only pops up when the top box is activated to save on vertical real estate). To compensate, the Refresh button gets demoted and tucked inside the refresh box. Not sure about the usability on this change yet…?

The more interesting speculation is about cut and paste, which Wired claims NO specific info on, but offers this as part of the ongoing search for some reason why Apple hasn’t yet implemented this seemingly core functionality:

It’s possible that Apple is taking so long to implement copy and paste not because it is difficult, but because Apple is reinventing it. Imagine a system-wide menu added to all applications which, instead of shuffling items off to a clipboard, lists all the places you can send that file (or text string). This would be like the existing “Open with” option available in the Mac’s right-click menu — each application effectively reports to the OS exactly what kind of files it can handle and the OS remembers this. Thus a picture could be sent to not only the Photo app, but to any other photo program. Text could be sent directly to any open dialog box in, say, Safari.

Sounds good to us. What about it, Joz?

Got a hankering to make an spot-on iPhone looking WebApp? Wanna mock-up an App Store application interface of your very own? Thanks to the hyper-generosity of teehan+lax, now you can!

Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets.

Since we know we’ll be doing more of this, we created our own Photoshop file that has a fairly comprehensive library of assets – all fully editable.

The 5MB download is available directly from their site, so if you want it, go get it!

(via TUAW)