Perhaps I am part of a very small minority in this regard but has anybody else noticed how poorly implemented scrolling is in the Google Play Music and Play Store applications? Here is a short video highlighting the problem.
What's happening here in both applications is that images are being loaded into RAM as they move into view, unloaded when they move out of view and then reloaded when they move back into view. This might seem insignificant but it impacts the user experience in two very negative ways.
The first is that while you are scrolling through the list of album artwork in Play Music or applications in the Play Store, you will encounter numerous little stutters as new images come into view and are loaded. Given that almost every other facet of Android 5.0 is running at a consistent 60 FPS, this is very jarring and unpleasant.
The second impact which this produces is that (especially in Play Music), you are forced to stop and wait for the album artwork to catch up with you while scrolling. This is highly inconvenient as one of the main purposes which album artwork serves is to allow you to quickly identify an album at a glance. It should not be necessary to crawl through the grid listing in order to easily distinguish one album from another.
Now with all of that said, I do understand why Google chose this particular scrolling implementation. The idea was to improve performance on lower end devices with less RAM and slower SoCs. On a low-end device with very little RAM and a slow SoC, caching a large number of images simultaneously would be quite taxing. This would have been a reasonable compromise to make three years ago but at this point you would be hard pressed to find a low-end device with less than 1GB of RAM and almost every flagship Android device currently ships with 3GB. In this case, Google's attempt to improve performance has actually had the opposite effect.
The HTC Music application on my HTC One M7 last year (which had 2GB of RAM) cached all of the album art immediately upon launching, which resulted in a perfectly smooth experience. There is nothing preventing Google from doing this. If necessary, they could even design these applications to check the amount of RAM available and change their behaviour accordingly.
For comparison, here is another short video demonstrating what a good scrolling implementation looks like.
In this recording, I scroll through about 250 cached images, occupying only about 6MB of RAM.
The points where it appears to get stuck are simply due to the poor touchscreen driver in this build of Lollipop and can be ignored.
Another issue with Play Music which has been bothering me is the size of the album list grid. Only being able to fit four albums onscreen at once is incredibly silly and there is no way to change it. What was Google thinking when they completely removed the standard list view?
Anywhoozles, I congratulate you on your perseverance for making it through this mini-essay. :highfive:
Related
i wonder
can any one explain me the systematization behind the picasa and the 3D gallery
the reason i am asking this is because i am confused by the way the gallery choose to order the photo it seems that it is by the order of the upload which is doesn't make sense.
another thing and more important is the way it is splitting the photos to groups
it should be by date and geolocation but what i get is:
for example,
first group (dec 8 2010) with 21 photos
second group (dec 8 2010) with 1 photo
* both groups with the same geolocation
sometimes it is split to 3 groups with the same date even photos with few minutes intervals
any ideas how to avoid this
its really bad when you have 1000 picture and instead having 10~15 groups you have 25~30
please Help
(i am using Nexus S, CM7)
UP PLease !!!
I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing it relies on the media scanner process, and service in the Android system that automatically scans your SD card for media files. And when the media scanner detects new photos, the gallery probably just throws them into their own group without considering how they relate to the other groups present. At least that's how it seems to happen.
I'm guessing the ordering of albums is so strange because it doesn't order albums. They appear in the way that they're internally cached, which will depend on a few different factors all mostly out of your control.
Honestly, I despise the default gallery with a burning passion. Sure, it's got a cheesy 3D effect that makes it all shiny and 2.0, but it's slow as hell, has several small but irritating problems (like everything you're talking about) and lacks any real features at all.
I use QuickPic myself. It's simpler: it presents your albums in a 2D grid, but it gives you a bit more control via the settings. Its big plus is, it's very fast. It picks up new images instantly, it renders the albums and individual pictures very quickly even when they're very large, and it can do so without lagging at all. The default gallery would lag like crazy whenever it tried to render newly-added content, and that's on my Evo 4G that I've done some work to optimize. I can only imagine how people deal with the default gallery on a slower phone.
Is there a version of Web Albums for ipad on Android? Or something equivalent.
The best thing about Web Album is it not only access your Picasa storage the way it is meant to be but also offers the option to cache your photos on your device (ipad).
That way, I solve the organization issue & maintains consistency across multiple devices.
Edit: Still looking for equivalent to Picasa for home videos though.... Any tips?
router54g said:
I use QuickPic myself. It's simpler: it presents your albums in a 2D grid, but it gives you a bit more control via the settings. Its big plus is, it's very fast. It picks up new images instantly, it renders the albums and individual pictures very quickly even when they're very large, and it can do so without lagging at all. The default gallery would lag like crazy whenever it tried to render newly-added content, and that's on my Evo 4G that I've done some work to optimize. I can only imagine how people deal with the default gallery on a slower phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This program doesn't show the picasa web albums
so its not really a substitute for the Built in Gallery
Do you have any solution for that
Did not know where to post this exactly, cause it may be the display...
Coming from the 700, I realize I am moving down in resolution, and on some things, I can see the difference (this is a whole other subject).
One thing that is key for me, is my Music. #1 duty for this tablet. On my 700, the album seemed crisp, but on my Note it seems to be a bit "fuzzy" when blown up.
Now, I am assuming this is the lower resolution, which is fine. My question is, to get crisp album art, do I need to go out and download higher res images and modify the album art on my stuff?
I am thinking that the majority of these are either pre loaded by Google when I uploaded them, and some are 300x300 (or in that area).
I love my Note, so I dont have an issue retagging these with new album art images (even though it will take time with my 6000 songs) but I just wanted to check if there was another way. Maybe another player that connects to Google Music?
For anyone that gives a crap, if you use Google Music like I do, and notice that your album art is blurry, you need a higher resolution album art graphic.
I tested this out with my All That Remains - The Fall of Ideals album. Cover was pixelated real bad.
I googled the album art and found one 1200x1200, and edited the album via the web page version of goolgle music.
Did a refresh of my library and the difference is drastically noticeable.
Looks like I will have a busy weekend.
This was a buzz a few versions ago, but not a popular topic anymore it seems. I am looking to create an app that can take pictures and save them as fast as the hardware will allow. AFAIK the preview was made a mandatory part of using the camera back around 2.3.3. We are currently working on rebuilding a version of CM without this requirements, but want to make sure we are not duplicating work. I have found a few little nuggets around that have given us hints, but doesn't seem like anyone has cracked the nut on this one yet. The overall goal being an app that captures high resolution imagery at a slow frame rate (compared to video). I would be happy with 5-10 fps. With the preview requirement, we see anywhere from 1-3 fps, usually in the lower range depending on the device. The target device for us will be the Samsung Galaxy Camera, but it should work across multiple devices as it is just a tweak to the camera API and underlying services.
Feature Request:
Frame by Frame Advancement
Please forgive me if this has already been requested but I did NOT see it in he current list of user requested features.
I, like others here, would really like to see a few of the features that I've grown accustomed to in VLC for desktops and that I find extremely useful; as well as necessary on a routine basis.
Among such features are the ability to step ahead and backwards when utilizing playback in frame by frame viewing mode. This allows for far more precise capture of individual frames when breaking down complex sequences or action segments for granular study and/or production of instructional videos, creation of icons for specific videos and how-to-type step-by-step manuals, etc.
I have hoped for this feature for a very long time and I'm grateful for all of the continued development and new features that are brought to MX Player Pro! This is my daily driver on Android and has been since at least 2010 or 2011.
With the addition of a frame by frame advancement feature, the next logical request is the addition of a frame capture feature that would swiftly save a PNG or JPEG to a user-selectable folder on internal or external memory source using a user-definable file naming convention that could include several readily available elements--time & date, video title, video frame timestamp, incrementing alphanumeric value(s), etc.
These are my immediate requests, though I have a few others, which are less pressing but still remain very much on my list of future "wishes" for MX Player Pro. Thanks in advance for your consideration and for so many years of awesome video playback on Android devices big and small.
Really useful idea. Frame by frame is always useful, even if to check out a scene in every little detail
After mucking around with certain games I used to have on my old Galaxy S8 I've discovered something interesting. I get ridiculous lag and frame pacing in just about every game leading to poor results in games such as Cytus 2 (fast paced rhythm game relying on accurate input with no lag) the new Sky game (stutters and tearing in both refresh modes), and a side scroller that has no heavy graphical fidelity (lags on screen and even tears sometimes).
This is all kind of in accordance to this recent review video of the p40 (different phone, same chipset)
https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p40-vs-galaxy-s20-plus-1133345/
Now one thing I've noticed is that if I use appassistant to launch these games, the poor performance disappears entirely. No lag anywhere, in Cytus, where before during fast sections it wouldn't even register taps 6-7 times per song, there are ZERO misses across the board. Similarly, no screen tearing or lag in any other game.
Wondering if the OS is optimized to cut power to the GPU and put it into limp mode during normal operation to save battery as I've noticed a dramatic difference in battery drop when using appassistant or not to play games. I mean naturally, the appassistant game center is doing its job but man that's a big difference.
Anyone have similar experiences?
Whats appassistant????