Romain Nurik posted an excellent article today on why you need to hand edit layouts for Android rather than using a WYSIWIG tool
First off, there will be some obvious bias in this post. I have been very fortunate in my working career to work with some truly great product managers, designers and artists on mobile applications and so for the benefit of the app consuming public none of my frankly brilliant crap UIs have ever seen the light of day. I do however still look forward to the day where by I can put a cheat mode into one of our own applications that resorts to developer place holder graphics! Some great examples of what games look like before an artist breathes on them can be found on this thread at Toucharcade
If you take the same view point as me, that to make a truly decent user experience for a given platform especially on mobile, then you need to understand the technicalities and nuances of developing for that platform. A great example of this would be the difference in the back metaphor on various devices, on Blackberry and Android you have a dedicated back button, iOS the use of UINavigationController and for Java mobile devices the use of soft keys and context menus.
Knowing these interface cues is why there needs to be a close interaction between developer and designer. It makes sense if a fast utility application is required to make sure standardised controls of the platform are used where possible (ie ContextMenus on Android vs UIActionSheet on iOS vs Softkey driven menus on Java based devices) otherwise a lot of development time can be expended on making custom UI controls that may or may not be necessary, if all stakeholders are aware of what components are available on a given platform. For this reason alone it is worth at least having a WYSIWIG editor so that designers who may be new to a platform (Java MIDP2 is younger than publishing to the web, and Android, iOS, WebOS are relatively new, let alone the even newer platforms mobile designers will have to contend with in the future ie Meego, Bada etc etc) have the ability to experiment with the UI widgets that are available for a platform and produce mockup guis that a developer can then bring to life!
The other area where at least having a fast preview of changes to the UI code is where a WYSIWIG editor can really help, or at the very least a very fast way of previewing on a decent simulator, in fact it has to be said MicroEmu perhaps leads the way here when it comes to very rapidly changing screen sizes
Where both Android and iOS have succeeded in my view is that they have made the information on what designers have to work with is far more readabily accesible. A simple Google search for icon design guidelines for three popular platforms will tell you a lot, bearing in mind with the current trend of app stores the icon is the first piece of information that you are likely to convey to your user therefore it pays to have the perfect dimensions. For example try the following searches
Having to dig for this sort of information is what in the future will infuriate both developers and designers as new devices, screen sizes and user interactions are released into the market
Therefore until Android becomes as set in stone as HTML/CSS I don’t believe many designers have the time to teach themselves another XML based layout manager and need to work closely with developers and hopefully have some sort of ability to experiment with UI metaphors without a developers assistance. This is something which a WYSIWYG tool whilst most likely constrained to a single resolution at least provides. Once this point is reached, much like a sane server admin will never let a developer loose on production infrastructure without supervision, a designer will not let the developers near the UI without their guiding light
However until that day I concur with Roman a hand coded UI will be superior this is still true even with WYSIWIG tools such as Interface builder on iOS
I had a bash at developing on Android before switching to iOS. Learning Interface Builder and Obj-C took a while, but now I am happily making hundreds of dollars a day from my apps. The WYSIWYG nature of IB makes developing UIs extremely fast once you have gone up the learning curve.
Yesterday I had to return to Android development to create a prototype for a client and what a shock to the system it was. The lack of WYSIWYG editing crippled my production speed. A piece of work that would have taken 2 hours on iOS and with XCode ended up taking me 10 hours.
Justifying the lack of suitable tools by this weird inverted logic is plain wrong. Apple’s IB software uses an XML description of the UI as its underlying representation. The problem here is the age old problem of Java UI’s. Write once, test everywhere.
I am so glad not to have to do this for a living any more. Someone at Google needs to fix this, and their staff have to stop telling those of use who are designer/coders that we don’t need WYSIWYG. We do, and we need it to be fast and easy to use as well.