Here lies the Sliding Pane Layout. RIP

A justification for some of the design choices I made; The second part in a series of essays leading up the release of Conversations 2.0

I had been a Jabber user for many, many years when I got my first Android device in 2012. It was around that time when Android received its first major UI overhaul called Holo. As a result the available Jabber clients all looked very dated to someone like me, who had never experienced the pre Holo UI first hand. The situation didn’t improve much over the next two years. Functionality aside, the pure aesthetics of Xabber and ChatSecure were enough to stop me from using Jabber on my new mobile phone and instead drove me towards using Hangouts. (For those who are not old enough to remember; Hangouts was one of many failed attempts from Google to step into the instant messaging market.) Despite all that I kept using Jabber on my desktop and kept wanting to use it on my phone as well. This ultimately lead me to the question on why those apps seemed to struggle with modern UI design. Finally in early 2014 I set out to answer that question and started to experiment and taught myself how to develop Android apps. My first task: A pixel perfect UI mockup clone of Hangouts with the working title »Secure Conversations« - A rather uninspired rip-off from »Chat Secure«, the name of one of the existing Jabber clients. Some weeks later, in my very own Facebook moment, a friend of mine, taking over the role of Justin Timberlake, would tell me to drop the »Secure«. But I’m getting ahead of myself.