[Android Head-Units] dagosjt:
Suggestions for UX/UI

Hello [MENTION=1633144]speedfire[/MENTION],

after I've bought the full version I'm slowly digging in the plethora of options. Fantastic piece of software where you feel you can do basically "anything", so congratulations for your fantastic job.

The only advice I can do is to try to delegate the UI/UX to the user. I mean I would try to give people instruments to improve the quality of skins instead to do everything by yourself, and I think this is what could boost the interest for the software.

Writing this I'm thinking about my experience with Nova Launcher and KLWP. I had a fantastic interface, but I missed Map and Radio FM integration directly on my screen, so i started to evaluate FCC. Said that currently I'm completely satisfied even graphically speaking with the skin I made by myself, I already see many things that, if implemented, will let us users dramatically improve the experience:

- As just asked, I think the main improvement could be widget overlay/overlap. For example I would like to use the Compass/Speedometer over the MiniMap instead of the digital speedometer; Thought even about direction widget. Or there are skins (like Audi cockpit) where Map is all the background and there are different widgets over it, currently impossible to simulate with FCC. When I used Nova/KLWP/KWGT I was able to "blend" together all the widgets much better and to use basically each pixel exactly as I want. Or again as suggested by Ericang you could use the image widget as "partial" background for a part of screen. There are a lot of ideas!

- Could you let the Mini-map to be narrower than "40"? I saw some skin having map like 25/30% of the screen lenght, and I can't try to reproduce on FCC.

- Could you give us a way to have graphical ODB2 widgets? To be honest I'm happily using the Torque widgets and everything works very well. The advantage would be for skinners, to have a coherent style all inside FCC.

- Could you consider a complete day/night theme switching? Ive seen only in MiniMap, I'm thinking about a generic one that changes each FCC widget used in the skin.

- Is it possilbe to backup "only the skin"? I successfully used both backup and restore, however I think this operation copy/paste everything, both "frontend" elements like widgets and their positions AND "backend" elements like all the various options. In my case I found on my tablet the options about autostart, ODB2, etc etc that I will not use on a different piece of hardware. Instead I re-used everything speaking about the skin interface. If I could backup/restore only the "skin" I shouldn't have to reconfigure everything related to specific hardware I need to change. In general it means that if somebody make a skin, he could distribuite only it without all the "inner" options probably different for each user.

Another advantage, probably in this way it will be faster to apply a new skin when a user wants to change it.

- About themes, I had big difficulties in looking inside this thread to check what other did and make some ideas... There could be a separate "repository" for themes? Maybe a separate thread on XDA could be enough.

- Is it possible to implement a "dock"? Meaning a group of icons/widgets fixed for each page. Many skins are those "buttons" always present, often highlighted to indicate you are on their page. Technically you still could do in FCC re-using in each page the same widgets/buttons, but it's really not practical.

- Other little things I've already read on the thread and I repropose here:

* You could put the most used car logos, for example to be used as background or inside image widget, instead to let each user to go and look for them.

* Similar for FM Radio logos.

* I would be interesting to have a "all-in-one" widget like other apps where info changes when you touch it.

Thanks again for you job!

---------- Post added at 04:15 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:05 PM ----------

In a separate thread to don't confuse things, may I ask if you can try to integrate NavRadio+ with FCC?

Thread is here:

https://xdaforums.com/android-auto/...-navradio-app-allwinner-units-t4024701/page10

I think it would be good for both of you, for me "integration" means that using the Music Widget FCC can directly switch to radio like it does with other players, and of course show RDS/Logos.