I have worked on a fresh design of the Android manager during the past
week. This became necessary, because the new design guidelines are
enforced when trying to use the current APIs - which we need to to
implement most items on our agenda. Google published a support library
this fall, that back-ports the required functionality to Android 2.2,
this layout will therefore work on all devices.

It comes with a handful of advantages over the current layout:
- it scales better among different screen sizes.
- recent menu items (e.g. suspend-resume) are more accessible
- more intuitive to use, since most apps are made like this these days.
- the structure (placement of tabs, menu items, menu overflow) is now
in sync with the recent Android design guidelines

There are a bunch of screenshot of a Nexus 7 tablet, a medium-sized
smartphone emulator and the HTC Wildfire (very small screen) in my
dropbox share, here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/i1ebp0xffoujx3m/H_jKaIQwNa

Some comments:
- I removed the Status tab, since nobody seemed to be very fond of it
and its purpose was mixed up: slideshow when computing, status
information when suspended.
- When suspended, there is now a universal status bar at the bottom of
the screen, independently of the selected tab
- Preferences is not a tab anymore, but a menu item, since it has a
different purpose than the informative tabs "Tasks", "Projects" and
"Notices"
- the decisions about how many menu items are shown, whether they have
text next to them or not and whether the tabs are placed in a extra
row or not is made by the system, depending on the screen size and
orientation.
- the suspend/resume menu button adapts to the current state
- menu items that get not placed in the bar, are under the overflow
button (the three dots)
- in sub screens (preferences, attaching project, event log) a tap on
the app icon brings the user back to the main screen (this is also
Android standard)
- if the device has a menu button (pre-Android-3.0 devices) it opens
the overflow menu (the three dots)

What do you think?

Rom, instructions on how to include the required support library are
here [1] under "Adding libraries with resources"

Joachim

[1] http://developer.android.com/tools/support-library/setup.html
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