Tailsnake

That’s a pretty flimsy argument, ICS as it is on the GNex is in no way a “beta” or a preview, it’s the full release edition of ICS. Even if we want to move the goal post and say something like the HTC One X is the first ICS device, it’s still been over 2 months since that’s been out and it’ll likely be a few more months before we see widespread release of ICS devices, that’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

The only real way to avoid this problem is to either force OEMs to ship stock Android (which is probably never going to happen) so they’d only have to update drivers for each new Android OS allowing us to get updates faster, or release Android to the OEMs months before making it public allowing the OEMs time to skin it and test it before users know about it.

Neither solution is likely to happen, the first won’t because OEMs and carriers want to differentiate handsets, the second wont happen because it would hurt Android’s open source reputation and delay development. Unfortunately, this is what we’ll have to live with.

Next year by this time 2/3s of Android phones will be on ICS and JB will have been out for 6 months :(

I just finished reading the " Dumbness In Games" article before I found it here, excellent read and really interesting comments

That’s just a random screencap of LockInfo on a Jailbroken iPhone that was similar to my setup back when I had one. I didn’t really want to take and upload a screencap of my current phone.

Your analogy with the Ribbon is flawed. The menu in Word 2007 was taking something that was meant for relatively simple programs and mapping it into a relatively complicated one, which lead to nested menus and relatively low usage of many of the program’s more powerful tools. It’s not the equivalent of driving a car in two eras, it’s the equivalent of trying to fly a plane with a control system made for a car, it just doesn’t work well. The C Menubar works well for relatively simple tasks, but it can be improved for more complicated tasks, the Ribbon is an attempt to do so (and based on MS analytics, it has drastically increased the number of features the average Office user accesses).

I agree with your complaint about buttons, at least on mobile, on desktops we have tooltips that tell us what the buttons mean (Though removing text lowers discoverability), on mobile the only way to figure out what the buttons do is to press them and hope nothing bad happens… that’s absolutely ridiculous and should not be a part of any UI design.

I use a combination of Beautiful Widgets and Executive Assistant to get the same information in Widgets that I did from LockInfo (Jailbreak App) on the iPhone. Weather, Email, SMS, Missed calls, Agenda, To Do list, and RSS at a glance is invaluable for me and makes using my phone far more efficient.