Hangout was designed to look pretty, not be usable. There's a lot of wasted space in the layout.

I spend at least 20% of my Android time chatting on hangouts with friends and family. Every time I open it on my phone I'm struck by how badly designed it is. Lots of pixels are devoted to either blank open space, or options that hardly ever get used. Did anybody bother to test this design on something smaller than a (phab/tab)let?

Here's a quick mockup showing how much more of the conversation could be shown on a 5.1" galaxy S7 with no loss of useful features. Here the percent increase in visible text is significant, but not as much as on many other phones, such as my Moto X2 which, despite having a 5.2" display has significantly less usable space due to the onscreen back/home/recent tasks buttons.

What I've done should be obvious, here's the justification:

The green header (magic bar) has been made half as tall. Active yesterday is frankly optional and could be eliminated, but getting rid of the redundant go back arrow leaves enough space for it to remain. Last active arguably should be shown down in the conversation view next to to the (j) icon. Either way, no excuse for hiding so much of the current conversation.

The second "magic bar" inside the "write a message" area contains useful but rarely used options. There's absolutely no reason why they could not be put on the upper magic bar, under the [...] menu. The whereami button is legitimately useful, and perhaps deserves to be on the main magic bar, the rest can go under [...]. Maybe you are the type to use lots of emoji's so perhaps you would mind the placement of the emoji icon in the [...] menu? Need I remind you that the keyboard has two emoji buttons of its own? Alternatively, the emoji icon could stay visible in the "write a message" area until you actually start typing.

This is all a general symptom of valuing pretty-(stylish?)-at-a-glance over useful-all-the-time. And a small dose of "easy to discover", since hiding the 2nd set of magic buttons under the menu does make discovery slightly harder. So, no big deal. Google, give us the option under settings to enable a compact view, for goodness sake. This gives you "pretty" and discoverable to start out with, and provides usability for your actual users too.

It's really too bad that hangouts no longer supports xmpp or the 3rd party api, or I'd write a simple client that didn't suck so bad. Given that there's no advertising in hangouts, it wouldn't even lose Google any money if people prefered my app over theirs.

Inverted camera hardware mod for Sony PS2 dual-shock controllers: for purchase!!

I grew up on inverted camera controls (joystick forward to look down, etc), but for some reason there are games that don't offer inversion as a toggleable option. Very frustrating, because once you adapt to a control scheme it's hugely distracting and difficult to switch to another. I would even say it makes the games unplayable. My solution to this problem is to rewire the Sony dualshock2 controller so that the inversion happens at a hardware level. To "switch" it on and off you have to swap controllers, which is a pain, but so much better than not having inverted camera. To cut to the chase, now that I've figured out how to do this, I'm offering my services to modify your dual-shock controller to be hardwired to inverted too.

To be fair, it's all about what you are used to. Once you grow attached to inverted (or uninverted) it just feels natural and all other schemes feel wrong. An inverted dualshock controller merely swaps what is reported to the console. E.g. when you push the joystick forward it sends the signal that it was pulled back. So an inverted controller can un-invert a game that only offers inverted camera, if that's your preference.

The form of inverted camera I prefer is inverted in both X and Y. That means pushing the stick forward shifts the view down (Y inversion). X inversion means that pushing the stick left turns the view to the right. Both X and Y inversion feel especially logical in 3rd person perspective games, where the camera "rotates" around the player.

Either X, or Y, or both can be hardwired inverted. A lot of games offer Y inversion as an option, but then don't invert X, so IMHO the most useful rewiring of the dual shock controller is just inverting X on the right joystick. I can invert either joystick or both. It doesn't really matter much in terms of complexity. (In fact the easiest is to invert x and y of both left and right joysticks; unfortunate, since that's not particularly useful).

A partial list of unconfigurable games that become playable with a hardwired inverted dual-shock controller: Red Dead Revolver, Ironman, Chicken Little: ace in action. There are many more. Of course there's a completely separate list of unconfigurable games made playable if you are the type that don't like inverted camera.

I'm offering my services for $30. That's actually not a good financial return on my time but this is a issue I feel fairly passionate about, and I'm really pleased that I figured out how to do it. For that price you need to send me a genuine Sony PS2 dual-shock controller to have moded. Please make sure it has plenty of life left in it. You can also do it yourself by opening up a PS2 controller, cutting some traces, and soldering new ones. It's not hard, just time consuming, but if you can solder it's totally worth it. I'd provide detailed instructions here but I've seen the inside of a few PS2 dual-shock controllers and each were different! The key is that each joystick has 3 pins for each axis. You need to swap the voltage between the two outer pins.

You can email me for more details/shipping address with the form at the bottom of this page.