A new great article went live on the Adobe Developer Connection website: Designing for the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook. In this article Paul Trani describes some fundamental design strategies you need to know while developing AIR applications for the RIM tablet.
Designing mobile content for the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook offers many new opportunities to engage audiences in exciting new ways. [...] BlackBerry smartphones hold 17.5 percent of the global smartphone market share, so your target audience could be quite large. [...] you can easily create business and productivity applications. You can also choose to extend the core components and design a rich, immersive experience from the ground up.
Read the whole article here.
Forum Nokia just published the QML UI Templates Library which provides commonly used UI-components for generic use with QML. This library is not meant to replace the official Qt Components-project but to provide larger templates for developers to take a look and utilize in their own projects.
The UI Templates Library contains reusable UI elements and templates used in the example applications RSSReader Example and Restaurant Application Example.
They are aimed to be the basic building blocks of QML applications focusing on the UI. They are not only elementary UI components, like buttons or switches, but rather more comprehensive templates like four views with tab navigation bar or a list view + details view integrated.
Read more information here.
I just came across a really useful resource published by Punchcut, a design toolset from managing screen resolutions: Pixel Proliferation.
The device landscape for which we design is always changing and the device types are always proliferating. And with the increasing demand for unique mid-screen devices, it is becoming an even more arduous task to keep things straight.
The UI projects range from HVGA mobile devices with touchscreens to high-definition televisions with 5-way input and Punchcut is offering the toolset to download here. (via Vivek)
We recently did some intensive testing on Android Face Detection capabilities investigating various solutions. Francesco Florio (Small Screen Design) wrote a very interesting article about our findings and the features and issues related to Android face detection, in order to create a Demo application that allows realtime human face tracking. You can read the full post here.
This is just the first part of the whole content, so, stay tuned!
Forum Nokia just renewed the Quick Guide to User Experience with the name Design Process in a Nutshell. It is now publicly available in the Design and User Experience library. Check it out here.
I just published a short tutorial about how to set up, compile and test an AIR for Android project using just Eclipse and FDT without even opening the Flash IDE:
If you own an Android 2.2 (Froyo) device you must know that you can already start building (and testing!) your AIR 2.5 applications for Android. There’s more: if you are an FDT user like me you should be glad to know that is very easy to build and package our AIR4Android applications without even leaving our favorite tool!
Read the full tutorial here.
On the Android developers blog was published a really interesting article about best practices for UI features and behavior patterns used to design and implement Twitter for Android:
Along with our regular updates of the Android platform, we like to build example applications that showcase best practices for UI features and behavior patterns, to help our 3rd party developers create even richer applications.
For example, the Twitter for Android application that we worked with Twitter to design gives you, the 3rd party developer, a working example of how you can customize and build an application that’s both fun and highly functional. This blog post is meant to showcase these patterns along with some recommended implementations as you start to develop your applications around them.
Read the full post here.
Serge Jespers just published Package Assistant Pro for Mac/Windows. Package Assistant Pro is an easy-to-use tool that help you with package native installers for AIR 2 and APK files for AIR on Android and eliminates the need to use the command line.
A few months ago I released an early version of my Package Assistant application. The application made it easier to compile native installers for AIR 2. While it was a lot easier to use compared to using the command line the application wasn’t very user friendly. A few weeks ago I started working on a brand new version and I think you will like it!
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