Android

This has to be the most useless and scary software update screens to date that I've seen. Don't get me wrong, I like Android and I'm getting back into developing software for it and iOS isn't blameless in the shit-UX department. I couldn't pass up this example of a super important interaction that is done so poorly. Even though I'm familiar enough to what a "target" is in this context, I'm still confused by the screen. I'm uploading TO the device, not downloading FROM the device. According to this warning, I'm safe to turn off my computer and unplug the USB. The block of text in the upper left, while useful to a developer, is super scary for a user. If they're lucky to be blessed with 20/20 vision it's still pretty useless information. ...

Public Service Announcement - Be careful who you send emoji characters to via text message - they may not be getting the output you expect! I was at a friend's house and she showed me her phone after getting a bunch of cryptic messages from an iOS user. I realized emoji doesn't necessarily render correctly on Android phones. Apparently KitKat fixes this to some success, however, she can't upgrade to that OS quite yet. Google Hangouts as her SMS application helped some but only to send. She still receives the malformed UTF-16 characters. ...