More Material Design

[eugenkiss]

Chanobol follows many Material Design guidelines. But there are still more reasonable guidelines to follow as well as current shortcomings to fix.

Helpful resources:

• Material Design Spec: http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html
• Material Design Checklist: http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2014/10/material-design-on-android-checklist.html
• Implementing Material Design: http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2014/10/implementing-material-design-in-your.html
• Defining Custom Animations: https://developer.android.com/training/material/animations.html

See for example the Newsstand App, Play Store App, Play Games App etc. for inspiration.

[eugenkiss]

With 1.2 I implemented Lollipop transitions yet still! But the following issues still bug me.

• When you return from PostsActivity to ThreadsActivity such that you scrolled down in PostsActivity such that the OP image is not seen anymore there won't be a shared return transition. That's fair enough in itself but the problem is that the ThreadView which had been clicked in ThreadsActivity before the respective PostsActivity was launched will be blank for a short amount of time. This looks bad. Either there is a way to force the shared element transition even if the OP post container is already recycled. Then it being blank actually fits because the image flies into the blank space again. This would be the ideal solution. Or there is a way to signify to ThreadsActivity when one returns to it that it should immediately reload the respective image so that its spot won't be blank.
  • Due to #132 this issue becomes more complicated because the thread tiles might change their order when you return to the ThreadsActivity (e.g. one thread received much more replies than previously and the sort order is reply count). Ideally, when resuming, the reordering should wait until the shared return transition is finished and, additionally, the reordering should be animated.
• The way I set the delay for the ripple animation is not so clever. The asynchronous request to load the respective data should be started immediately and not only after the around 300ms elapsed. So the GUI waits 300ms but the request starts immediately. Find a way to do this. Challenge: this happens between Activity boundaries. But there must be a better way... (I tried to simply increase the start delay for the move animation. The problem is that the shared element will be drawn on the overlay and one cannot see most of the ripple then). I think there is an okay way to achieve this with RxJava, see my comment in #15.
• How do I add a ripple effect on quoted links?
• Start and end the circle reveal effect for PostsDialog from where the click originated just like for ImageActivity
• In the Play Store app the status bar is translucent on top of the drawer. I tried to imitate this behavior for Chanobol but didn't manage to make it work even though a supposed solution is linked to from the Material Design Checklist.
• The shared return transition from MediaActivity to GalleryActivity and the interaction between these two activities should become more intelligent now that you can swipe between images ("gallery scrolls with mediaactivity swipes"). Currently, when you click on an thumbnail in the gallery, which opens the higher-res image in MediaActivity, and then swipe to another image, the shared return transition will use the initial image. This is okay I believe as it flies from the left when you swiped to the right and vice versa which has a nice spatial correspondence. But it could be better. Consider the following situation:

  • User is on gallery. Clicks thumbnail with image X. Shared element transition from thumbnail with image X to ImageActivity with image X starts with a UUID as a transition name. Then User swipes right to next image Y and then clicks back (finishes ImageActivity). First problem: Due to unique transition name, Y will not share transition name with its respective thumbnail in gallery. This can be fixed by using index as transition name. Assume this is accomplished. But two additional problems. When shared return transition starts afaik the thumbnail X will be blank for some time which looks bad. Maybe this can be fixed with having a clone thumbnail under every thumbnail. But still another problem. Say user swipes 100 times to the right to image Z such that thumbnail Z was not even visible in gallery when user clicked on X. Ideally, during shared return transition gallery will in parallel scroll such that Z's thumbnail place will become visible.

  • You can manipulate the return shared element behaviour for a transition by overriding some stuff.
• Like in the Play Games app the newly loaded post cards in a thread should not fly straight from the bottome but have a slight skew.
• Do not use Thumbnail for shared return transition if higher-res image has been loaded. If it is webm somehow save first frame and use this instead of thumbnail. But low-priority is just icing on the cake.

I need to create individual issues from these points some time.