Let me re-phrase my questions … from Surface Duo BUILD’s ATE session
It’s been a while since Guy and his team had an “Ask the Experts” session during Microsoft BUILD conference and later on a Twitch live team with the whole squad.
I really liked it to interact with all the folks behind the device’s SDKs. They are always helpful and always open for constructive feedback.
That is why it is important to me to say it clear and loud. I do not rephrase my questions because I got ignored by the team or the team did not try to understand and help me. It’s for sure more related to the fact that I’m not a native speaker and the possibility is high that my questions where not that good phrased at all.
Thanks to the magic of written words, I try now to rephrase my questions again and put some examples in it what I really mean.
High quality marking screenshots for apps running on the Surface Duo
Marketing is one of the biggest challenges. Not only the marketing to consumers but also the marketing and the pitching of an app idea inside a company or its development team.
Videos and images help a lot in getting the message delivered those applications that are optimized for dual screen devices have a real benefit in terms of the actual demoing scenario. Especially for such a new device category as the Surface Duo is.
The problem is that if you take a screenshot using for example scrcpr (see my post), the hinge is not visible and instead it is just a blank space filled by the app’s background color. The same behavior occurs for video captures.
Needless to say, that no device’s posture is visible in screenshots, too. This is all no problem if you have a design team to hand which can resize and transform your screenshots, as a “lone rider” it’s not a hurdle that I can overcome by myself.
What I would wish …
Would be, for example, a Figma Artboard that has the open and spanned Surface Duo with the actual hinge’s black area as an overlay with the correct width and dimensions of it.
As a developer, I would use 3 layers:
- The background which is the Surface Duo device frame
- The app screenshot itself as it comes out of the device
- As overlay the black hinge area
The outcome would be a great image for app stores or presentations or even videos.
The ultimate dream would be a live preview of the app in Android emulator’s posture preview window. It would be amazing to show people how both screens would work perfectly together if they were angled against each other. This is very hard to show off using 2D images.
What’s likely to come first, Android 12 or Flutter foldable support?
This sounds rather “customer”-ish but if I understand the impact of both updates correctly, it heavily affects (Flutter) app developers who are targeting the Surface Duo. Android 12 itself supports foldable far better than Android 10 and also Microsoft’s Flutter contribution would literally boost the developer-friendliness and stability of dual screen features using the new Google framework.
As always, it could be possible that I’m absolutely on the wrong track and the impact will not be that big as I thought.
Customer success stories for Duo optimized apps
Nothing is better than to be able to show other people existing, real world apps that are used in a B2B context.
For me it’s hard-to-find Duo-optimized apps in general. It seems that neither Microsoft nor Google has a filtered app list of it.
In my business sector, I could see more than one perfect spots for dual screen devices.
What I would wish …
For example, for a field representative to have all needed information handy if they are talking to a customer. Often are this information being table-based logs of sales history, revenue, and more. The large screens of the Duo would help to give the rep. an easy overview over its customer but without the massive techy impact of a tablet.
#developercommunity to help
Thanks for reading that long post. It would be great if some of the awesome Surfae Duo development community could help to answer my questions or simply to give feedback. I’m the only one who needs for example a better way to take screenshots or to read customer success stories?
