برچسب: feature

Samsung Good Lock’s latest feature promised freedom, delivered chaos

When Samsung started overhauling Good Lock for One UI 7, Home Up was one of the modules that saw the biggest changes. Most of those changes were good, letting you modify edge panels, the taskbar (on Folds and tablets), the overview screen, and the home screen itself. As welcome as those features are, I found one of the additions harder to appreciate. DIY Home has a lot of potential, but despite the wonderfully awful home screens you can create with it, the implementation is flawed and reminds me of the worst days of Microsoft’s Windows experiments.

Have you tried to customize your phone with Samsung’s DIY Home?

835 votes

DIY Home: What is it and why do I hate it?

DIY Home removes all of the guardrails usually placed on home screen customisation. Grid, icon, and widget sizes are unrestricted, and you can put everything, everywhere, all at once. On the surface, that sounds pretty cool. Moving every element to exactly where you want it without any restrictions could lead to some cool setups and maybe a renaissance of the old custom launcher days. I initially hoped for that, but it hasn’t worked out. The way DIY Home has been implemented is almost unusable, and I can’t bring myself to use it for any longer than is needed.

Long-press on an empty space on your home screen or pinch out, and a new DIY Home button appears in the top right of the screen. Once you’re in the DIY editor, you can move icons and widgets freely without any limitation, resize and rotate them, and add stickers, emojis, and text.

Using DIY Home is like trying to play chess against an opponent who cheats, changes the rules, and flips the board if you start winning.

The controls are, in a way, too simple. Even on my S24 Ultra, which is realistically the biggest screen most people will try this with, there isn’t enough room to move things precisely with your finger. It needs a movement slider or arrow keys, like the widget creator in KWGT.

Another issue is the alignment presets, which are all unlabelled, so you have to press them to figure out what they do. By then, all of the icons you’ve selected are on top of one another in some incoherent mess that looks like it belongs in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Icon manipulation is also inconsistent. Sometimes tapping on a new icon and dragging it while a different one is already selected will clear that selection and only move the new one, while other times it’ll move both or neither.

Using DIY Home is like trying to play chess against an opponent who cheats, changes the rules, and flips the board if you start winning. It’s frustrating and confusing, and it nearly drove me to throw my phone at a wall.

Can you make DIY home screens look good on One UI?

Zac Kew-Denniss / Android Authority

The answer to that one is maybe. I definitely can’t; the screenshot above is the best I could do after nearly an hour of messing with it. Perhaps if you’re more patient or creative, you can squeeze a nice home screen out of DIY Home, but I think that effort would be better spent on Nova Launcher or KWGT. My colleague Ryan Haines agrees, too, saying he wishes he hadn’t even tried DIY Home.

I think Samsung’s efforts would be better spent elsewhere, too. One UI 7 introduced the vertical app drawer many of us wanted, but many users, including my wife, preferred the paginated horizontal layout. The option to revert to that, along with more blur and background color options, would be more useful than this.

In 1995, Microsoft released Microsoft BOB, which was meant to make navigating Windows more intuitive. It didn’t. Instead, it was an incomprehensible mess, just as most DIY Home creations are, and unless Samsung can overhaul it into something more usable, it’s best forgotten.

Do you like DIY Home, or do you think other features would be a better use of Samsung’s (and our) time? Let us know in the comments.

Source link

18/05/2025
Android Studio Meerkat Feature Drop is stable
Posted by Adarsh Fernando, Group Product Manager

Today, we’re excited to announce the stable release of Android Studio Meerkat Feature Drop (2024.3.2)!

This release brings a host of new features and improvements designed to boost your productivity and enhance your development workflow. With numerous enhancements, this latest release helps you build high-quality Android apps faster and more efficiently: streamlined Jetpack Compose previews, new Gemini capabilities, better Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) integration, improved device management, and more.

Read on to learn about the key updates in Android Studio Meerkat Feature Drop, and download the latest stable version today to explore them yourself!

Developer Productivity Enhancements

Analyze Crash Reports with Gemini in Android Studio

Debugging production crashes can require you to spend significant time switching contexts between your crash reporting tool, such as Firebase Crashlytics and Android Vitals, and investigating root causes in the IDE. Now, when viewing reports in App Quality Insights (AQI), click the Insights tab. Gemini provides a summary of the crash, generates insights, and links to useful documentation. If you also provide Gemini with access to local code context, it can provide more accurate results, relevant next steps, and code suggestions. This helps you reduce the time spent diagnosing and resolving issues.

Gemini helps you investigate, understand, and resolve crashes in your app much more quickly in the App Quality Insights tool window.

Generate Unit Test Scenarios with Gemini

Writing effective unit tests is crucial but can be time-consuming. Gemini now helps kickstart this process by generating relevant test scenarios. Right-click on a class in your editor and select Gemini > Generate Unit Test Scenarios. Gemini analyzes the code and suggests test cases with descriptive names, outlining what to test. While you still implement the specific test logic, this significantly speeds up the initial setup and ensures better test coverage by suggesting scenarios you might have missed.

Gemini helps you generate unit test scenarios for your app.

Gemini Prompt Library

No more retyping your most frequently used prompts for Gemini! The new Prompt Library lets you save prompts directly within Android Studio (Settings > Gemini > Prompt Library). Whether it’s a specific code generation pattern, a refactoring instruction, or a debugging query you use often, save it once from the chat (right-click > Save prompt) and re-apply it instantly from the editor (right-click > Gemini > Prompt Library). Prompts that you save can also be shared and standardized across your team.

The prompt library saves your frequently used Gemini prompts to make them easier to use.

You have the option to store prompts on IDE level or Project level:
Compose and UI Development

Themed Icon Support Preview

Ensure your app’s branding looks great with Android’s themed icons. Android Studio now lets you preview how your existing launcher icon adapts to the monochromatic theming algorithm directly within the IDE. This quick visual check helps you identify potential contrast issues or undesirable shapes early in the workflow, even before you provide a dedicated monochromatic drawable. This allows for faster iteration on your app’s visual identity.

Themed icon support in Preview helps you visually check how your existing launcher icon adapts to monochromatic theming.

Compose Preview Enhancements

Iterating on your Compose UI is now faster and better organized:
Compose previews render more smoothly and make it easier to hide previews you’re not focused on.

Build and Deploy

KMP Shared Module Integration

Android Studio now streamlines adding shared logic to your Android app with the new Kotlin Multiplatform Shared Module template. This provides a dedicated starting point within your Android project, making it easier to structure and build shared business logic for both Android and iOS directly from Android Studio.

The new Kotlin Multiplatform module template makes it easier to add shared business logic to your existing app.

Updated UX for Adding Devices

Spend less time configuring test devices. The new Device Manager UX for adding virtual and remote devices makes it much easier to configure the devices you want from the Device Manager. To get started, click the ‘+’ action at the top of the window and select one of these options:
It’s now easier to configure virtual devices that are optimized for your workstation.

Google Play Deprecated SDK Warnings

Stay more informed about SDKs you publish with your app. Android Studio now displays warnings from the Google Play SDK Index when an SDK used in your app has been deprecated by its author. These warnings include information about suggested alternative SDKs, helping you proactively manage dependencies and avoid potential issues related to outdated or insecure libraries.

Play deprecated SDK warnings help you avoid potential issues related to outdated or insecure libraries.

Updated Build Menu and Actions

We’ve refined the Build menu for a more intuitive experience:
The Build menu includes behavior and naming changes to simplify and streamline the experience.

Standardized Config Directories

Switching between Stable, Beta, and Canary versions of Android Studio is now smoother. Configuration directories are standardized, removing the “Preview” suffix for non-stable builds. We’ve also added the micro version (e.g., AndroidStudio2024.3.2) to the path, allowing different feature drops to run side-by-side without conflicts. This simplifies managing your IDE settings, especially if you work with multiple Android Studio installations.

IntelliJ platform update

Android Studio Meerkat Feature Drop (2024.3.2) includes the IntelliJ 2024.3 platform release, which has many new features such as a feature complete K2 mode, more reliable Java** and Kotlin code inspections, grammar checks during indexing, debugger improvements, speed and quality of life improvements to Terminal, and more.

For more information, read the full IntelliJ 2024.3 release notes.

Summary

Android Studio Meerkat Feature Drop (2024.3.2) delivers these key features and enhancements:
Getting Started

Ready to elevate your Android development? Download Android Studio Meerkat Feature Drop and start using these powerful new features today!

As always, your feedback is crucial. Check known issues, report bugs, suggest improvements, and connect with the community on LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube, or X. Let’s continue building amazing Android apps together!

^**Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Source link
06/05/2025
Health Connect Jetpack SDK is now in beta and new feature updates
Posted by Brenda Shaw – Health & Home Partner Engineering Technical Writer

At Google, we are committed to empowering developers as they build exceptional health and fitness experiences. Core to that commitment is Health Connect, an Android platform that allows health and fitness apps to store and share the same on-device data. Android devices running Android 14 or that have the pre-installed APK will automatically have Health Connect by default in Settings. For pre-Android 14 devices, Health Connect is available for download from the Play Store.

We’re excited to announce significant Health Connect updates like the Jetpack SDK Beta, new datatypes and new permissions that will enable richer, more insightful app functionalities.

Jetpack SDK is now in Beta

We are excited to announce the beta release of our Jetback SDK! Since its initial release, we’ve dedicated significant effort to improving data completeness, with a particular focus on enriching the metadata associated with each data point.

In the latest SDK, we’re introducing two key changes designed to ensure richer metadata and unlock new possibilities for you and your users:

Make Recording Method Mandatory

To deliver more accurate and insightful data, the Beta introduces a requirement to specify one of four recording methods when writing data to Health Connect. This ensures increased data clarity, enhanced data analysis and improved user experience:

If your app currently does not set metadata when creating a record:

Before
StepsRecord( count = 888, startTime = START_TIME, endTime = END_TIME, ) // error: metadata is not provided
After
StepsRecord( count = 888, startTime = START_TIME, endTime = END_TIME, metadata = Metadata.manualEntry() )
If your app currently calls Metadata constructor when creating a record:

Before
StepsRecord( count = 888, startTime = START_TIME, endTime = END_TIME, metadata = Metadata( clientRecordId = "client id", recordingMethod = RECORDING_METHOD_MANUAL_ENTRY, ), // error: Metadata constructor not found )
After
StepsRecord( count = 888, startTime = START_TIME, endTime = END_TIME, metadata = Metadata.manualEntry(clientRecordId = "client id"), )
Make Device Type Mandatory

You will be required to specify device type when creating a Device object. A device object will be required for Automatically (RECORDING_METHOD_AUTOMATICALLY_RECORDED) or Actively (RECORDING_METHOD_ACTIVELY_RECORDED) recorded data.

Before
Device() // error: type not provided
After
Device(type = Device.Companion.TYPE_PHONE)
We believe these updates will significantly improve the quality of data within your applications and empower you to create more insightful user experiences. We encourage you to explore the Jetpack SDK Beta and review the updated Metadata page and familiarize yourself with these changes.

New background reads permission

To enable richer, background-driven health and fitness experiences while maintaining user trust, Health Connect now features a dedicated background reads permission.

This permission allows your app to access Health Connect data while running in the background, provided the user grants explicit consent. Users retain full control, with the ability to manage or revoke this permission at any time via Health Connect settings.

Let your app read health data even in the background with the new Background Reads permission. Declare the following permission in your manifest file:
<application> <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.health.READ_HEALTH_DATA_IN_BACKGROUND" /> ... </application>
Use the Feature Availability API to check if the user has the background read feature available, according to the version of Health Connect they have on their devices.

Allow your app to read historic data

By default, when granted read permission, your app can access historical data from other apps for the preceding 30 days from the initial permission grant. To enable access to data beyond this 30-day window, Health Connect introduces the PERMISSION_READ_HEALTH_DATA_HISTORY permission. This allows your app to provide new users with a comprehensive overview of their health and wellness history.

Users are in control of their data with both background reads and history reads. Both capabilities require developers to declare the respective permissions, and users must grant the permission before developers can access their data. Even after granting permission, users have the option of revoking access at any time from Health Connect settings.

Additional data access and types

Health Connect now offers expanded data types, enabling developers to build richer user experiences and provide deeper insights. Check out the following new data types:
These new data types empower developers to create more connected and insightful health and fitness applications, providing users with a holistic view of their well-being.

To learn more about all new APIs and bug fixes, check out the full release notes.

Get started with the Health Connect Jetpack SDK

Whether you are just getting started with Health Connect or are looking to implement the latest features, there are many ways to learn more and have your voice heard.
We can’t wait to see what you create!
Source link
02/05/2025