In which I'll occasionally post various telling bits of UI from the big update - here's the first one:
So we went with the Facebook/Path-style sidebar after all, after realizing that our hierarchy is really only deep because we limit ourselves to 5 items in the bottom bar - doing things this way should make task switching a lot faster and more flexible and gives us virtually unlimited UI expansion potential for the future.
The type design in the entry list is unfinished - you can see the new fonts are in, but we're still using the old layout. (finished type design arrived a few days ago but we haven't implemented it yet) Though it's actually not going to change all that much, since we already support pretty much any arrangement you might want - the default may be a different one, though, e.g. characters + pinyin on the same line.
Note the absence of a bottom toolbar in the dictionary search screen - tentative, but we're finally taking the "your user interface is too complicated" complaints seriously, and none of the options besides the now-replaced fan icon were actually important enough to anchor to the UI by default. So the current plan is the menu button at the top left, a combined dictionary + language switch button (see this Android thread for some discussion of that) at the top right, an input method bar that slides out when the keyboard is open and that's it. (embedded definition / iPad gets a few more buttons but possibly still no bottom bar, we're still rearranging things there)
Also note the multiple documents under the document reader - particularly pleased with that one, we're combining multi-session support with a recent document history (also extending to the clipboard / lyrics / web / etc) so that you'll basically just see a list of the last few documents you've viewed and won't need to even think about which one is "active." (the list will be expandable, but we're still deciding between a "More..." item and a little > button next to "Document Reader" - Facebook does the latter but we think the former is more discoverable)
So we went with the Facebook/Path-style sidebar after all, after realizing that our hierarchy is really only deep because we limit ourselves to 5 items in the bottom bar - doing things this way should make task switching a lot faster and more flexible and gives us virtually unlimited UI expansion potential for the future.
The type design in the entry list is unfinished - you can see the new fonts are in, but we're still using the old layout. (finished type design arrived a few days ago but we haven't implemented it yet) Though it's actually not going to change all that much, since we already support pretty much any arrangement you might want - the default may be a different one, though, e.g. characters + pinyin on the same line.
Note the absence of a bottom toolbar in the dictionary search screen - tentative, but we're finally taking the "your user interface is too complicated" complaints seriously, and none of the options besides the now-replaced fan icon were actually important enough to anchor to the UI by default. So the current plan is the menu button at the top left, a combined dictionary + language switch button (see this Android thread for some discussion of that) at the top right, an input method bar that slides out when the keyboard is open and that's it. (embedded definition / iPad gets a few more buttons but possibly still no bottom bar, we're still rearranging things there)
Also note the multiple documents under the document reader - particularly pleased with that one, we're combining multi-session support with a recent document history (also extending to the clipboard / lyrics / web / etc) so that you'll basically just see a list of the last few documents you've viewed and won't need to even think about which one is "active." (the list will be expandable, but we're still deciding between a "More..." item and a little > button next to "Document Reader" - Facebook does the latter but we think the former is more discoverable)