ux

Re: Chathead Basics

In Pierre-Yves Ricau's blog from 2013 he walks you through how to make a very basic version of Facebook's Chatheads, which if you haven't read is a great read and is yet another reason why I love Android. At the end of his blog he asked the question:

"Does this imply that Facebook Chatheads (or any application with SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission) is able to conduct keylogging and take screenshots at arbitrary time?"

It was a great question but after trying to explore more with adding views directly to the window I think I found another concern.

Being an Advocate for Android

“We can just port this from iOS to Android”  If you are an Android engineer then chances are you have heard this phrase many times in the past few years. It may even be because of this phrase that you are here today. I am no exception to this quandary, numerous times in my career I have found myself responding to this question or others like it. The first time I heard this I became irritated because certainly any designer working in the mobile industry already knew everything about Android. I quickly realized that this wasn’t one person neglecting the beloved Android platform. The problem is a lack of day to day experience with the platform. From that day forward I decided I will not contribute to the growing divide between the Android organization and the rest of my company. That was the day I became an advocate for Android.