Category Archives: Documentation

Written apologies.

Android, Documentation, Software

Play Store, Android Wear, and Internationalization

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Here’s a quick internationalization tip for managing your Play Store assets for Android Wear apps:

1) Run your app in a Wear emulator paired with a physical Android device.

2) One by one, go to each “screen” in your Wear app that you want to show in the Play Store entry, and perform step 3 for it.

3) For each supported language, change the input language on your Android device (via Setup -> Language & Input)

4) Take a screenshot of the emulator window, and save it with an appropriate name.

5) Repeat #3 until all languages are represented for the given screen, and repeat #4 until all screens are represented.

The magic of this technique is that the Wear emulator will switch languages along with the Android device, so you only need to navigate through your Wear app once to get screenshots for all supported languages.

Design, Documentation, Technology

The Relationship Between Design and Documentation: A Heuristic

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Personal experience seems to indicate that the best Designs do not need Documentation to be usable, but the worst Designs need pages and pages of Documentation. The heuristic is that the quality of a Design is inversely proportional to the length of the user Documentation.

The problem, of course, is that there’s no guarantee that a poorly-designed product has enough compensatory Documentation. Likewise, someone may have just written lots of Documentation for something that didn’t really need it.

Taken on its own, it’s not perfect, but if you are looking at adopting a product, process, or other technology, you may want to choose the one that, all else being equal, has the slimmest manual.