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59 lines
6.9 KiB
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59 lines
6.9 KiB
Markdown
The history of Android
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Another Play Store redesign! This one is very close to the current design and uses cards that make layout changes a piece of cake.
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Photo by Ron Amadeo
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### Out-of-cycle updates—who needs a new OS? ###
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In between Android 4.2 and 4.3, Google went on an out-of-cycle update tear and showed just how much Android could be improved without having to fire up the arduous OTA update process. Thanks to the [Google Play Store and Play Services][1], all of these updates were able to be delivered without updating any core system components.
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In April 2013, Google released a major redesign to the Google Play Store. Like most redesigns from here on out, the new Play Store fully adopted the Google Now aesthetic, with white cards on a gray background. The action bar changed color based on the current content section, and since the first screen featured content from all sections of the store, the action bar was a neutral gray. Buttons to navigate to the content sections were now given top billing, and below that was usually a promotional block or rows of recommended apps.
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In April 2013, Google released a major redesign to the Google Play Store. Like most redesigns from here on out, the new Play Store fully adopted the Google Now aesthetic, with white cards on a gray background. The action bar changed color based on the current content section, and since the first screen featured content from all sections of the store, the action bar was a neutral gray. Buttons to navigate to the content sections were now given top billing, and below that was usually a promotional block or rows of recommended apps.
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The individual content sections are beautifully color-coded.
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Photo by Ron Amadeo
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The new Play Store showed off the real power of Google’s card design language, which enabled a fully responsive layout across all screen sizes. One large card could be stuck next to several little cards, larger-screened devices could show more cards, and rather than stretch things in horizontal mode, more cards could just be added to a row. The Play Store content editors were free to play with the layout of the cards, too; a big release that needed to be highlighted could get a larger card. This design would eventually trickle down to the other Google Play content apps, finally resulting in a unified design.
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Hangouts replaced Google Talk and is now continually developed by the Google+ team.
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Photo by Ron Amadeo
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Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, was usually where a new Android version was announced. But at the 2013 edition, Google made just as many improvements without having to update the OS.
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One of the biggest things announced at the show was an update to Google Talk, Google's instant messaging platform. For a long time, Google shipped four text communication apps for Android: Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, Messaging (the SMS app), and Google Voice. Having four apps that accomplished the same task—sending a text message to someone—was very confusing for users. At I/O, Google killed Google Talk and started their messaging product over from scratch, creating [Google Hangouts][2]. While initially it only replaced Google Talk, the plan for Hangouts was to unify all of Google's various messaging apps into a single interface.
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The layout of the Hangouts UI really wasn't drastically different from Google Talk. The main page contained your open conversations, and tapping on one opened a chat page. The design was updated, the chat page now used a card-style display for each paragraph, and the chat list was now a "drawer"-style interface, meaning you could open it with a horizontal swipe. Hangouts had read receipts and a typing status indicator, and group chat was now a primary feature.
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Google+ was the center of Hangouts now, so much so that the full name of the product was actually "Google+ Hangouts." Hangouts was completely integrated with the Google+ desktop site so that video and chats could be made from one to the other. Identity and avatars were pulled from Google+, and tapping on an avatar would open that person's Google+ profile. And much like the change from Browser to Google Chrome, core Android functionality was passed off to a separate team—the Google+ team—as opposed to being a side product of the very busy Android engineers. With the Google+ takeover, Android's main IM client now became a continually developed application. It was placed into the Play Store and received fairly regular updates.
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The new navigation drawer interface.
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Photo by [developer.android.com][3]
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Google also introduced a new design element for the action bar: the navigation drawer. This drawer was shown as a set of three lines next to the app icon in the top-right corner. By tapping on it or dragging from the edge of the screen to the right, a side-mounted menu would appear. As the name implies, this was used to navigate around the app, and it would show several top-level locations within the app. This allowed the first screen to show content, and it gave users a consistent, easy-to-access place for navigation elements. The nav drawer was basically a super-sized version of the normal menu, scrollable and docked to the right side.
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----------
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[Ron Amadeo][a] / Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.
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[@RonAmadeo][t]
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via: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/building-android-a-40000-word-history-of-googles-mobile-os/23/
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译者：[译者ID](https://github.com/译者ID) 校对：[校对者ID](https://github.com/校对者ID)
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本文由 [LCTT](https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject) 原创翻译，[Linux中国](http://linux.cn/) 荣誉推出
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[1]:http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/balky-carriers-and-slow-oems-step-aside-google-is-defragging-android/
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[2]:http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/hands-on-with-hangouts-googles-new-text-and-video-chat-architecture/
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[3]:https://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation-drawer.html
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[a]:http://arstechnica.com/author/ronamadeo
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[t]:https://twitter.com/RonAmadeo |