Floating action button

[flynn]

Thanks for making the new floating action button optional.
I like to stick with the traditional button bar because it requires less clicks, e.g. to mark a message as unread.

[andrewilley]

I guess the problem I have with a FAB is that I never seem to want to do what the button thinks I should.

e.g. I very, VERY rarely ever compose a new email message on my phone - I might send a quick reply to something incoming, but I only write a new email on my phone a couple of times a month at most, I use my PC for that.

Now a FAB that could be configured might be useful, but on the whole I'd prefer I nice line of icons to let me choose the function I want. Combining several common icons (search, refresh, new message) onto the top bar might help save the extra space of the bottom bar being on the screen too.

Andre

[Kostya Vasilyev]

I'm not too crazy about the FAB myself, but:

- Gmail, built-in Email, Google+, Calendar (I think), Evernote -- all use the FAB for "create / compose / new record / new event" type actions.

- There are gesture alternatives to the other "commands" (as @Paris Geek so rightly noted -- and he's world's #1 expert on Aqua). So it would be strange to use the FAB for "refresh" if there already is a "pull to refresh".

- For message actions (mark read/unread, etc), Aqua has swiping in message list. Very customizable too, under settings -> swiping.

[andrewilley]

I agree it's a personal thing, which is why I've turned it off.

I have also turned off pull-to-refresh, as it would try to refresh again every time I pulled down simply to be sure that I was at the top of my message list. I have also turned off the 'Select All' gesture, as it was too easy to trigger by accident when scrolling through messages if my finger happens to be off-centre.

Slightly off-topic, but I'm not a big fan of any kind of gesture which relies on the user finding specific unmarked areas of the screen which are not clearly visually segregated. The same goes for menus which scroll in from the side if you start a gesture from the very edge of the screen, as opposed to another action which might be triggered by similarly swiping sideways within the main screen area. Also, activity buttons should generally be clearly delineated with their own trigger-area outline (e.g. separate keys on a keyboard layout) and not just placed somewhere within a solid area of colour.

But all of the above are problems with Material Design in general, and are no criticism whatsoever of the excellent AquaMail, for which Kostya has done a sterling job of giving the user the choice of configuring the app to work how the user wants it to rather than how Google thinks things should be.

Andre

[Droidlovinyogi]

This is why I (we) love Android OS!

Choices...which is also why I love AquaMail. To each his own is a beautiful thing! I'm on the other end of the spectrum from Andrew. I love the material design, how visually fluid and integrated it is, but with the relatively similar layout of the apps. I use my phone all throughout the day to write and send email, read email, work on documents and other work-related tasks. In that regard I consider myself a power user, and I love the FAB, gestures, software buttons and swiping a variety of apps/tasks from all edges of the screen, and in many apps.

I like that AquaMail fully utilizes and make these options available. I love working on a full screen that has no visible controls obstructing my view, but that can be easily and conveniently accessed from the screen's edges or revealed by swiping from within an app. In fact since I'm on Paranoid Android, I don't even have the software buttons (or status bar) on the screen unless I swipe them from the edge when I need them.   

I consider Kostya a brilliant developer who with AquaMail truly captures choices, which is the hallmark of Android. "Be together, not the same".

[Kostya Vasilyev]

>> I'm not a big fan of any kind of gesture which relies on the user finding specific unmarked areas of the screen which are not clearly visually segregated. The same goes for menus which scroll in from the side if you start a gesture from the very edge of the screen, as opposed to another action which might be triggered by similarly swiping sideways within the main screen area. Also, activity buttons should generally be clearly delineated with their own trigger-area outline (e.g. separate keys on a keyboard layout) and not just placed somewhere within a solid area of colour

That's older than Material Design. Google has been moving away from "every UI element should clearly communicate what it does" to "try tapping and swiping everything you see on the screen - you never know if it does something" since Android 4.0.

And going back even more -- you can see this type of UI in Microsoft's (yes, Microsoft's) concept videos from a few years ago.

Personally, I also dislike how it makes the UI much less discoverable (by just looking at it), but at the same time, it looks more modern (remembering that "modern" is just fashion to a large degree, that is, arbitrary).

On the other hand, there are many users who do want the "latest and greatest" UI patterns, and feel perfectly at ease with swiping and pulling and twisting and squeezing (ok, maybe the last two were an exaggeration).

So that's why I tried to provide choices.

[andrewilley]

Cheers, your hard work is much appreciated. And the clean look is great, up to the point where (as you put it) people have to start waving their phones around in case some bizarre control function has been set to trigger by shake, or a 270-degree device rotation, or a thumb and two fingers downward swipe at 45-degrees. Control of a functional device should be obvious and intuitive, not a poetic journey of exploration.

I do like software that makes use of as much of the screen real-estate as possible by the way (as Droidlovinyogi mentioned) which is why I always buy phones with physical menu/back buttons in addition to the Home button. Otherwise I'd have bought an iPhone in the first place (OK, there were other reasons, but that is one of them). [It's also why I wrote my own website to use dynamic width pages, rather than forcing users with 1920+ pixel wide monitors into only being able to use 1024 pixels of their screen when viewing my pages - but now we're getting REALLY off topic! ]

And yes, Microsoft are equally guilty of this same trendy modern (well, modern for this week anyway) "design for design's sake" debacle. They were really getting somewhere with the Windows 7 UI, and then the dumbed-down flat interface of Windows 8 came along. Needless to say, I still use Windows 7.

Andre

[flynn]

So that's why I tried to provide choices.

Thank you for all the useful comments (I learned about the gestures) and thanks Kostya for providing the choices.