Since the launch of Android 6.0 Marshmallow, we’ve been using the System UI demo mode – an operating system setting that populates the systems status bar with fake data, to give it a cleaner look.
Previously: Opaque drawing on top of the original status bar. !(/assets/images/blog/2016/clean-statusbar-with-quickdemo/) The lack of color adaption is immediately noticeable in videos that show transitions between differently styled activities or when opening modal dialogs that darken the activity and status bar in the background. While this works well when showing opaque status bars with a fixed background color, it cannot be used for transparent status bars or background colors that dynamically change based on the displayed activity’s theme (like the real status bar does). It draws on top of the original dirty status bar, hiding it below a clean-looking overdraw. In the past we had two primary ways of capturing clean screenshots and videos on Android:Ĭlean status bar is an app for developers. A high quality screenshot speaks for itself and shows the level of detail that goes into every aspect of our products. However, our quality control does not end with the app, but extends to screenshots and videos taken of the app, as well.
For all of you that couldn’t listen to my presentation, check out this blog post! ?Īt PSPDFKit, we’re developing PDF Viewer – a PDF app for Android and iOS that has a clean look, is simple to use, and enormously powerful! We put a lot of effort into making the app, as well as the PDF framework powering it, look as clean as possible. In this blog post, we take a look at the Android System UI demo mode that remedies the aforementioned problems and present a tool QuickDemo for fast and convenient status bar cleansing.Ī special Thank You to everyone who joined this month’s Android Heads Meetup at Google Vienna.
The feature was introduced in the first developer preview as a more granular control method for notification settings, then it was further modified in the second developer preview with some shuffling and renaming of the different levels and the addition of a sixth one, and now in the third developer preview, we're seeing one more option: Automatic importance.More often than necessary, screenshots and videos of Android apps suffer from showing an untidy status bar with unwanted notification icons, a drained battery indicator, and a different time on every screenshot. The saga of "full importance" notification levels in Android N continues. This Auto toggle lets you restore that setting back to its original state, giving the decision back to the developer.
But if you decide to go the full importance route, you get to manually set each app's priority level, which overrides the freedom given to the developer to make the decision. It's how all notifications work by default. Android already lets developers control priority on a notification-by-notification basis (see "Correctly set and manage notification priority" section here).