Gesture support really does add value to the mobile experience. Come on Google, get with the program…
The browser has to be one of our most heavily used applications on our phone, and after a month with the Nexus One we finally got around to addressing the issue of multi-touch support. The native Browser application that ships with the Nexus One does a fairly decent job of bringing the internet to its 3.7 inch screen despite lacking multi-touch. Sites that have been optimised for mobile apps reduce the need for too much zooming in and out, and the auto-zoom feature also does a fairly good job of making the browsing of non-optimised sites less painful. Even so we’ve found the +- magnifying glass solution fairly cumbersome at times. As Andy Rubin, Google’s VP of Engineering pointed out in his it does allow you to browse the internet using just one hand, but we couldn’t find many other reasons why we’d prefer this style of browsing over multi-touch. But since Android has multi-touch gesture support built in we thought we’d have a go at enabling it to find out what we’re missing out on.
The Dolphin Browser
One easy solution is to download and install the Dolphin browser app, which provides a gesture enabled web browser without having to make any changes to the Android system. It also allows you to set-up your own gestures for common web browsing commands. We found the two-fingered pinch functionality for zooming in and out of web pages to be very smooth, and have to admit that it made web browsing a much more fluid experience. Swiping left and right to go backwards and forwards to pages in your history is so much faster and more intuitive than using the back and forward buttons built into the native browser interface. But whilst the gesture support in Dolphin is great we never really got comfortable with it as our everyday browser. It has great potential and we’re looking forward to seeing it progress, but we found the interface a little hard to get used to. We were always conscious of the Dolphin interface, and felt that it didn’t ever really get out of the way enough to let us focus on actual web content. It’s a personal preference, and others may find that Dolphin suits them really well, but we felt that the native browser does a better job of simply letting you browse the internet and focus on content with as few distractions as possible.
Enabling gesture support in the native browser
Thanks to Android being an open source project we were able to install a patch from Luke Hutchinson which provides pinch & zoom functionality for the native browser. So after rooting our Nexus One and installing the patch we now have pinch & zoom working. It’s not as smooth as Dolphin’s implementation - zooming in and out works, and is an improvement on the +- button solution, but feels a little jumpy at times, and doesn’t always behave exactly as you’d expect. That said, it’s still a valuable improvement on the functionality that the browser ships with, and in our opinion gives a much more fluid web browsing experience. Even without additional swipe gesture support it’s a worthwhile install, as long as you’re comfortable rooting your phone.
Come on Google, what about some native support for gestures?
Andy Rubin seemed genuinely annoyed by (last 5 minutes of the clip) over the apparent lack of multi-touch in Android. Whilst the framework does give developers the ability to implement multi-touch in their own applications, Google has so far seemed reluctant to implement it in applications that ship with the phone. Given the usefulness of something like pinch-zoom in a browser running on a small screen it’s hard to see their reasoning behind this. Eric Tseng, Senior Product Manager of Android, has hinted that this may change in the future but ‘we’re working on it’ is a vague answer to something that many see as an essential technology for usability in a handheld device. Especially since the Android framework itself already supports it.
Let’s hope that Google really is working on integrating gesture support more fully into their native apps, as not everyone is going to be prepared to void their warranty just to enable a technology which is already seen as such an integral part of mobile computing. So far it seems that Google has been trying to sidestep the question of multi-touch on Android, brushing it off as a kind of non-essential feature. Whatever the reasons for this may be, we’d just like to add our voice to the chorus. Google, if you’re listening… We really do value multi-touch gesture support on a mobile device. It really does make a difference.
Update: It looks like Google really does listen…
