Macadamian Blog
Android - Theming the Unthemable
If you are relatively new to Android, we highly recommend you check out our guide: Your First Android Release - It Could Go Well (Or Really, Really Badly)
“What we've got here is... failure to theme. Some views you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last project, which is the way Android wants it... well, it gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.” – Captain, Road Prison 36
Some of you might recognize the previous paragraph as the introduction of Guns ‘N Roses’ Civil War or from the movie Cold Hand Luke starring Paul Newman. This is the feeling I get when I try to create a custom theme for an application on Android. The Android SDK does permit some level of theming, which is not really well documented to start with. Other things are hard-coded, “so you get what we had here last project”. Now, one of the things your application will most likely use is the Options menu, which is the menu you see when you press the hard menu key. It is kind of... orange. In our last project, we had to completely remove the orange in favour of our customer’s color scheme, which is on the blue side.
UI Innovations in Self-Care Software
Microsoft Healthvault and Google Health encourage users to enter their daily information for tracking purposes, whether it's a diabetic entering daily glucometer results or a fitness buff tracking weight and body fat. But for all but the most dedicated, browsing the website and manually entering data every day is simply more trouble than it's worth. The process of entering that data must be so natural that it becomes an automatic part of the user's day.
It's not a question of confusing UI or poorly designed UI - Google Health in particular is very straightforward in the way it allows users to enter this data.
When it comes to a solution that needs to track data daily, user needs simply go beyond what a software interface can offer.