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.
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)
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'm happy to announce that this blog is now featured in "Alltop" mobile stories! AllTop is a news aggregator that allows you to track the best inspiration news available in the Internet.
The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, "What’s happening?" in "all the topics" that interest you. Alltop does this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic, groups these collections — "aggregations" — into individual web pages.
Then Alltop displays the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. A pretty cool news... Thank you Alltop staff!
We, at Small Screen Desing, just published a new application on the Android Market: SmoothBeats.com Radio! SmoothBeats.com is a group of hip-hop and jazz radio stations streaming non-stop underground and mainstream hiphop beats 24 hours a day. This radio application was designed and developed by Small Screen Design and is fully compatible with all Android devices.
SmoothBeats.com Radio features a complete personalized UI, supports ShoutCast metadata and streaming in standby mode. Ah, one more thing: it's completely free! Enjoy!
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