Option to hide data updates

[jongpie]

Any chance we can have an option to hide the update process (not sure what the "official" name is, but it's the black bar that appears at the top of the screen that shows what data is being downloaded)? My thoughts are either you can tap it to hide it (I'd prefer something like this so that I know that the updates are occurring, but can hide it if needed) or an option under Settings to just never show it.

The reason I'd like to hide it is that it gets in the way of navigating between favorites and all contacts, as well as sometimes covering the "Compose SMS" button. Normally when it's just updating my recent calls, voicemails and SMS, it's not that big of a deal. But I've got an app on my phone that updates contacts' photos from Facebook, so sometimes VoiceCentral will have 50+ photos to update (apparently, some of my friends/family REALLY enjoy updating their profile pics ). It gets a bit annoying waiting for that to finish before I can access all of the buttons.

[Chris]

Do you think it would be just as effective to leave the status messages in their current location but allow the taps to "pass through" to the elements below? It's possible that the status messages may need to be a bit more transparent using this approach, but it seems that would give the desired behavior without losing the benefit of knowing when/what background processing is taking place.

[jongpie]

That would work, but I don't know if it would be intuitive? If I see an overlay, I don't expect to be able to click/tap through it to the buttons below.

I also had one other idea on how to handle it. What if the div (I assume it's a div tag) appears just below the blue header on each tab and then is hidden when the updates are complete? I've thrown together a quick mockup of this idea - view it here

The left half shows what it would look like while updating. One disadvantage to this design is that it would push the data (contacts, SMS, etc.) down further on each tab. But if it's contained within the scrollable area (noted by the red bracket), you can still get to all of your data as well as access all the buttons/functionality. Once the update is complete, it would go back to the right half of the mockup (which is what it looks like today).

Hope this makes sense!

[joey]

@jongpie I like the design cool

[Chris]

We'll have a fix for this in the next release. It's similar to the approach you posted, but it works well across the different screens as they come into and out of view.

[jongpie]

Awesome! Can't wait to see it. And just curious - do you try to have scheduled releases (for example, once a month or whatever), or do you just do a releases once you've made several fixes/enhancements and think it's a good time to deploy?

[Chris]

We typically have a set of fixes/enhancements that we want to get into a release and we base the actual push to production on what is ready and tested. The next release (v1.1.1) is coming very soon (Monday?) because we need to get a fix in for an issue playing voicemails.

[jongpie]

Thanks for the info (and all the help!). Looking forward to the update

[joey]

Just wanted to chime in and say that I like new better intergration of data updates. Very nice.

[Chris]

Thanks. We're glad you like it.