Re: Forge Android App: 11-30-2014 Alpha 1.5.32.004
I chose long press to zoom on purpose, as double-tap should do something else in many places, such as confirming a list item selection, or tapping the land behind the current land when on the field. I also don't understand what right-click menu you're referring to, unless you mean the menu in the deck editor. I think that one opening on a single tap is actually more usable that way than having to hold down to get the menu.markthema3 wrote:Fantastic work so far, a few issues have come up and I have a few ideas/suggestions.
The app sometimes crashes when the splash screen says it's loading fonts and the progress bar is full. I've had a few crashes that seem like low ram crashes, even after a fresh reboot and with a gig of ram, and I'm not using any card images.
The app generally isn't as responsive as I would like, and some higher resolution UI assets and/or better UI scaling is definitely in order.
If you still haven't decided how to implement things that go in the right click menu on desktop versions of forge, the "proper" way would be to bring up the right click menu when the user does a long press. You're currently using long press to show the zoomed in view of a card. For one, there should be some indication to the user that something will happen if they keep pressing (typically darkening the pressed item is fairly standard). For two, I think a double tap gesture makes more sense for zooming (that's how it's used in mobile web browsers), which would then free up the long tap gesture for the right click menu.
If would be cool to create a native UI using standard Android UI components and design patterns as much as possible, and only use the desktop UI bits where necessary (playing field, card rendering, etc). Using the built in components would almost certainly improve the responsiveness of the UI, make managing scaling easier, and make Forge feel more at home on Android, but on the other hand it would probably be a lot of work.
I'm going to check out the code when I get home tonight and look for other areas that could be improved. Maybe implement the double tap for zoom and long tap right click menu if I have time.
That said, I can consider adding a setting to switch up the inputs, but I'd want to give it some thought and see what others think. In the meantime, please don't go and change it yourself.
As for using native Android components, that's not an option, as the app is rendered completely using OpenGL via libgdx. If there's a specific component you think could be made more usable, I can try to optimize the performance, although you're welcome to try too.