Posted by the Android group
Ideas is a digital illustration app created by TopHatch that helps inventive thinkers carry their visions to life. The app makes use of an infinitely-large canvas format, so its customers can sketch, plan, and edit all of their huge concepts with out limitation, whereas its vector-based ink gives the precision wanted to refine and reorganize their concepts as they go.
For Ideas, having extra on-screen actual property means extra consolation, extra inventive house, and a greater consumer expertise total. That’s why the app was particularly designed with giant screens in thoughts. Ideas’ designers and engineers are all the time exploring new methods to develop the app’s giant display screen capabilities on Android. Because of Android’s suite of developer instruments and sources, that’s simpler than ever.
Evaluating an increasing market of units
Giant screens are the quickest rising phase of Android customers, with greater than 270 million customers on tablets, foldables, and ChromeOS units. It’s no shock then that Ideas, an app that advantages customers by offering them with extra display screen house, was interested in the format. The Ideas group was additionally enthusiastic about innovation with foldables as a result of having the big display screen expertise with larger portability offers customers extra alternatives to make use of the app within the methods which can be greatest for them.
The group at Ideas spends plenty of time evaluating new giant display screen applied sciences and experiences, looking for what {hardware} or software program options may profit the app essentially the most. The group imagines and storyboards a number of situations, shares one of the best ones with a close-knit beta group, and rapidly builds prototypes to find out whether or not these updates enhance the UX for its bigger consumer base.
As an illustration, Ideas’ designers just lately examined the Samsung Galaxy Fold and located that customers benefited from having extra display screen house when the system was folded. With assist from the Jetpack WindowManager library, Ideas’ builders carried out a function to mechanically collapse the UI when the Galaxy’s giant display screen was folded, permitting for extra on-screen house than if the UI had been expanded.
 |
Ideas’ first launch for Android was optimized for ChromeOS and, due to this, supporting resizable home windows was necessary to their consumer expertise from the very starting. Initially, they wanted to make use of a bodily system to check for numerous display screen sizes. Now, the Ideas group can use Android’s resizeable emulator, which makes testing for various display screen sizes a lot simpler.
Android’s APIs and toolkit carry the workload
The builders’ objective with Ideas is to make the illustration expertise really feel as pure as placing pen to paper. For the Ideas group, this meant reaching as near zero lag as doable between the stylus tip and the strains drawn on the Ideas canvas.
When Ideas’ engineers first created the app, they put plenty of effort into creating low-latency drawing themselves. Now, Android’s graphical APIs eradicate the complexity of making environment friendly inking.
“The {hardware} to assist low-latency inking with larger refresh fee screens and extra correct stylus information retains getting higher,” mentioned David Brittain, co-founder and CEO of TopHatch, mum or dad firm of Ideas. “Android’s mature set of APIs make it simple.”
Ideas engineers additionally discovered that the core Android View APIs deal with many of the workload for supporting tablets and foldables and make heavy use of customized Views and ViewGroups in Ideas. The app’s coloration wheel, for instance, is a customized View drawing to a Canvas, which makes use of Animators for the reveal animation. View, Canvas, and Animator are all courses from the Android SDK.
“Android’s instruments and platform are making it simpler to deal with the number of display screen sizes and enter strategies, with well-structured APIs for growing and rising the variety of selections for testing. Plus, Kotlin permits us to create concise, readable code,” mentioned David.
Ideas’ customers desire giant screens
Tablets and foldables signify the majority of Ideas’ investments and consumer base, and the corporate doesn’t see that altering any time quickly. Presently, tablets ship 50% larger income per consumer than smartphone customers. Tablets additionally account for eight of the highest 10 most steadily used units amongst Ideas’ customers, with the opposite two being ChromeOS units.
Moreover, Ideas’ month-to-month customers spend 70% extra time participating with the app on tablets than on conventional smartphones. The applying’s score can also be 0.3 stars larger on tablets.
“We’re trying ahead to future enhancements in platform usability and customization whereas rising experimentation with transportable type components. Continued efforts on this space will guarantee excessive consumer adoption properly into the long run,” mentioned David.
Begin growing for big screens right this moment
Be taught how one can attain a rising viewers of customers by rising growth for giant screens and foldables right this moment.
