Constant Contact Labs Developer Blog
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QuickView for Android Preview Posted Friday, December 18, 2009 10 Comments
We’ve written in some detail here about QuickView, Constant Contact’s iPhone app. It’s providing our customers with a quick and convenient way to interact with their email campaigns, contacts and lists while on-the-go, and we’re hearing from iPhone-owning customers that they really appreciate the value it adds to their Constant Contact accounts.
We’ve also been hearing from customers of the nation’s largest wireless carrier, though, and they’re wondering when they’ll be able to take advantage of a mobile Constant Contact experience. The answer is: soon. Very soon. Labs is happy to pull back the curtain a bit today and talk about the upcoming QuickView for Android.
QuickView for Android
Fundamentally, QuickView for Android is very similar to its iPhone sibling. Both are designed to help busy customers by providing quick access to email statistics and common tasks. Each supports the same set of features and activities. The main differences relate to how each app conforms to the particular style of its operating system, be it iPhone OS or Android OS.
Landscape orientation
For starters, Android supports much more variation in physical phone hardware than iPhone does, and that means QuickView for Android needs to gracefully adapt to phones with (or without) physical keyboards, phones with different screen shapes and sizes, and phones with both iPhone-style touch screens and BlackBerry-style trackballs. Supporting all of these variations introduces challenges to both design and development.
Another notable difference in QuickView for Android lies with its use of the Menu button. Android phones have a physical button that, when pressed, pops up a list of actions that can be performed on the current screenful of data. The Menu button presents an Android-specific design tradeoff from a UI perspective, because it hides many of the actions a user can perform offscreen. This provides the benefit, though, of freeing up valuable screen space for information display:
Email statistics
The tradeoff is that a user looking at that screen won’t be able to tell which actions can be performed until he or she presses the Menu button:
Pressing the Menu button
Differences in the screen space vs. feature discoverability tradeoff is one of the main differences between Android and iPhone.
We’ll be showing more of QuickView for Android over the coming weeks, and we’re excited to expand the range of Constant Contact offerings for mobile devices. We hope you’re excited too!
The opinions expressed here represent those of the author and not those of Constant Contact, Inc. Read Blog Terms
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Veve fred | 10:50 AM February 26, 2010
Yes we are exited ! Stay tuned to use it soon !!!!! thanks
Jim Garretson | 11:41 AM February 26, 2010
We’ll have more to announce about QuickView for Android soon! Keep checking this site for the latest.
PR | 5:02 PM April 13, 2010
Anything new on the Android App?
Jim Garretson | 8:35 PM April 13, 2010
Hi PR, We’re still working on it! I’m sorry for the delays.
David Willis | 10:01 PM June 6, 2010
Picked up my HTC Evo G4 today. I’ll be using your app when it’s ready.
JB | 1:47 PM June 7, 2010
How soon before the Android App is released?
Jim Garretson | 3:46 PM June 7, 2010
Hi JB, We should have more to share later this month!
Cristhian Romero | 11:34 AM June 10, 2010
I cant wait for this to be out it would be so helpful. Please Release soon!
lorenzo cantoni | 3:22 PM June 19, 2010
waiting for it!
Jim Garretson | 6:06 PM June 30, 2010
Hi all, please take a look at our new announcement about QuickView for Android! http://conta.cc/cM0o00