This year I will have the honor and pleasure to represent Small Screen Design at MAX 2011 in Los Angeles and showcase our Cassandra Stand application. This will be my first MAX, so if you'll be there too and if you like, just stop by and say Hi!
This is looking seriously cool. The phone version of the Android Market is going to change for better:
The new Market client is designed to better showcase top apps and games, engage users with an improved UI, and provide a quicker path to downloading or purchasing your products. For developers, the new Android Market client means more opportunities for your products to be merchandised and purchased.
Read more on the Android developers blog.
Recently I had the opportunity and time to read a nice book related to native Android UI development: Android User Interface Development (Beginner's Guide) by Jason Morris - Packt Publishing.
Since the book itself claims to be a Beginner's guide it offers a very good hands on approach to learning Android UI development. A really useful and practical guide tο take уου step-bу-step through thе process οf developing user interfaces tο gеt уουr applications noticed.
Definitely a good read for both the beginner or for the Java developer who want to take its Android development skills one step further. You will not find informations like how to setup your IDE and development environment, it's all code, samples and tips... directly to the point:
Working through examples, code-snippets, and screenshots this book introduces the fundamentals of good user-interface design from a developer's point of view. This book will put you above the rest by showing you how to build striking user interfaces to grasp your app users' attention enough to make them shell out some bucks to buy your application.
Interested? Ream more details here!
For the second year in a row I'll be present at the most interesting mobile developer conference here in Italy, the WHYMCA. And this time the whole Small Screen Design crew will join me! The conference will take place in Milan the 20th-21th May and will cover lots of interesting topics from development to design and user experience.
There will be also a whole Flash Camp about AIR Mobile and Playbook development! Among the Flash Camp speakers there are well known professionals like Mihai Corlan, Andrea Trento and Luca Mezzalira. Ah! Alessandro La Rosa is a speaker too! You can find the agenda and all information about the event here (italian). Stop by and say hi if you'll be there too!
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)
(via UXMag) - The video below was put together by Lyle Alzaldo and some of his friends. It's an animated tribute to UX design for a pick-me-up. Enjoy!
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