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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I always thought Sync for Reddit looked cool, but never found myself comfortable with it because RIF existed, and I always felt more comfortable with it.
I'm now using Sync and it is pretty great, but in my case it required some UI fiddling. It looks like Material Design 3, but I feel there's something wrong with the default values for font and text size nothing that is unfixable, but just... Weird
Tweaking things to meet your usage is fantastic in Sync. The dev has some weird defaults, but assumes you want to tweak almost everything.
That's honestly something I don't entirely get in the case of Sync. Like, there is nothing wrong with allowing users to tweak things, but Sync is like, really heavy on the Material Design 3, you look at it, and it is undoubtedly M3. Yet, there is always something odd about the way it uses it.
Take for instance, the Navigation Bar, under Material Design Guidelines it is meant for destinations. And yet, on sync it offers:
The main FAB is also weird, as it isn't the primary action of the screen, it just opens a bottom sheet to bring more "actions" (some of which are destinations...)
Like, Sync is a very good app, but it has a few odd things that are really weird.
I'm not super sure what you're complaining about with the navigation bar. It's well within the realm of what Google uses them for. Go look at the YouTube app for example. It has a button on the navigation bar that opens a bottom sheet as well. I'd argue Sync's use of it is more in-line with the guidelines than YouTube is, since the sheet for exploring is closer to a destination than a sheet for uploading different kinds of videos. The only odd thing is being able to convert the FAB into a navbar button, but at least it's an option and not a requirement.
YouTube Music and Google Podcasts also have an "Explore" option on the navbar, they just open a page instead of a bottom navigation. He probably could convert that sheet into a page to make it more consistent, but it's probably a sheet for usability reasons.
I think the point about the FAB is good in theory when talking about what the material guidelines say, but so few apps actually use the FAB, and I think Sync's implementation which allows for such robust customization is a good and fairly intuitive use of it, even if it doesn't exactly follow every guideline. It still does allow you to pick one primary action for it. It just also gives you more options.
YouTube doesn't exactly use M3, it has some similarities, but it is pretty much its own thing. The bottom area on YouTube is also not exactly the same as the Navigation Bar from M3, the Create Button is very clearly not the same as the rest. In fact, the entire bottom area looks sort of similar to the Bottom App Bar from Material Design 2
About YouTube Music and Google Podcasts. Yeah, they have an "Explore" option, but they work vastly differently from Sync, and it isn't even a matter of being a page vs bottom sheet. On Podcasts it works more like seeing the "Everything" feed than the explore sheet on Sync.
I think Sync would benefit from removing the "Explore" option, and changing "Posts" to "Everything", and adding new targets from "Local" and "Subscribed" if they want to continue using the Navigation Bar.
OR, they could swap it for a Bottom App Bar, and remove the "Posts" button, and treat the Inbox as being a subscreen rather than a main destination
I don't know enough about M3 to really comment on that, but when he updates things we cry about the changes. It looks like material design is 9 years old. He's been developing Sync for, what, 12 years and a bit? So we've probably requested a lot of stupid shit, but he's pretty good about listening. I know I was unhappy with some of the major UI updates and was happy he let me choose.
Settings shortcut: General > Base font size
I also struggled with this until I found this setting.
Ps. Be sure to set the other fonts to small, or it's going to be so large.
I really don't understand how so many apps get the default font size right, but Sync somehow appears to ignore system defaults or something? Like, I really like that it allows everyone to customize, but by default it looks like an app for ants
If I'm not mistaken Sync's dev is a relatively young guy (I recall reading he was a student a few years back) which likely means he hasn't experienced the joys of vision going downhill with age like many of us old farts have.
I'm old as shit now 👴🏻 (34)
That's one of the reasons I used to hate Sync lol.
RIF is hot garbage for UI though.
Sorta...? Like, the outdated part is the visual, but the rest of the app is mostly fine, so you can spin the outdated visual as being minimalist or something like that. If you just updated the components to Material Design 3 it would be functional and fine.
The same couldn't be said for Tasker for instance, which is outdated in general, and just updating the components wouldn't fix much of the issues it currently has with the UX.