BarbaraHudson's Journal: Lollipop as bad as I feared

When I looked at the development docs for Lollipop, my reaction to their "material design" was "this is going to be a problem." After updating to it and playing around for 15 minutes, I'm not impressed.

Simplifying stuff too much doesn't make it easier to tell what something does. The bottom icons, for example, are now a triangle, a circle, and a square. It's even harder visually to tell if a toggle is on or off. The phone app has been downgraded again in terms of screen real estate, showing even fewer speed dial entries w/o scrolling, and they really need to check their spelling.The tabs are "SPEED DIAL | RECENTS | CONTACTS" Come on, "recent" is an adjective. It modifies the noun, which can be singular or plural. You wouldn't write "RECENTS CALL", would you?

The low contrast between text and backgrounds might be "stylish", but good design would have form follow function. Making stuff harder to read, even with huge fonts? Don't do me no favors, mkay. And the on-screen keyboard ... yuck.

Some horizontal tabs are now partially off-screen. so unless you knew what they were before the update, you'll have to guess. Switching from Dalvik to ART (Android RunTime) was an option in Kitkat 4.4.4. Now it's not just the default - there is no option to go back to Dalvik as the runtime.

Is it faster? Not that I can tell. Going from the lock screen to whatever app was last opened is definitely slower - probably because of the fancy-pants wipe with an arc in it. It's not all negative, though. Maps now has moved the Directions and Explore buttons to the map itself rather than having to go through a menu.

But their "Material Design" doesn't bring anything materially better to the table.