Thursday 2 January 2014

Carbon for Android v2 - some niggles

The new version of Carbon for Android is out which features a number of changes including some quite striking visual differences to the original. My install was automatically upgraded to the new version yesterday and I must say that the interface is even more slick than the old one, but I have a number of issues with the new design.

1. The refresh icon rotation is off-centre.
I'm not quite sure why this has been done as it frankly looks a bit scrappy. Centering this would make the feature complete and professional.

2. A lot of space taken up by the 3 dots at the top.
Seriously, you could fit an entire line of text in the space occupied by those 3 little dots. Better use of that space could be made.

3. The font has a weird aspect ratio.
It is clear that you love this font but I find it much harder to read with its oddly vertically stretched aspect. It would be so welcome to have the option of a shorter font. This is practically a deal-breaker for me and the thing I can least understand as to why it has been forced.

4. No Tweet size of "small" ?
The menu option only starts at a size of "medium"; that's pretty weird.

5. Retweet mesages.
It's hard to tell immediately whether the message saying that something has been retweeted belongs to the tweet above or below the message. A hint of a border here would really help.

6. Bug - faded tweets.
Some tweets appear faded suddenly for no reason but then are fine when restarting Carbon.

I am so glad that I can now get to my own favourites at last, and the work on the profile view is pretty epic. Carbon itself is an amazing piece of software. But there are these few things that need to be addressed before I will be happy with the update, sorry guys.

Please note that if the font thing is addressed then I will definitely donate. I don't mean to hold to ransom but I feel pretty strongly about this issue.

Update: They fixed the font issue!