Keeping With Tradition

October 14, 2011 in Featured, Programming

Gather ’round boys and girls. For story time today we’re going to talk about the importance of meeting user expectations for how android apps operate. If you’ve ever used an android phone, you’ve probably noticed that the two most important buttons are the Back and Home keys.  When you press the Back button you expect to, well duh, go back. And when you press home (and click your heels together three times) you expect to be brought back to rural kansas with Todo by your side. No? Oh well then you probably were just trying to get back to your home screen.   TECHNICAL CONTENT WARNING!   Now what you may not be aware of is what these two buttons are actually doing. I won’t get too bogged down in the details, but essentially Android OS uses different stacks for your applications that hold the different things you are doing, known as activities. You could have a messaging stack, web browser stack, or a contacts stack for example. If you’re in the messaging stack, the first screen you see is put on the bottom of the stack. Once you select “text messages” from this screen, your list of text messages is called forward
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