mobiForge Articles Feed - Section: Designing

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 4: Even More Views

weimenglee — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:13:12 +0000

In this final installation of the Android Views series of articles, we shall continue our exploration of another category of views - Menu views, and some additional cool views. The views discussed include:

Context Menu
Options Menu
AnalogClock
DigitalClock
WebView

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 3: More Views

weimenglee — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:59:23 +0000

In the previous article, you saw the various basic views such as the TextView, EditText, Button, and how you can use them in your Android applications. In this article, we shall continue our exploration of another three categories of views - Picker views, List views, and Display views. The views discussed include:

TimePicker view
DatePicker view
ListView view
Spinner view
Gallery view
ImageView
ImageSwitcher view
GridView view

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 2: Views

weimenglee — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:31:47 +0000

In the previous article on Android UI you saw the components that make up the UI of an Android application. The basic unit of the Android UI is the View. A View represents a widget that has an appearance on the screen. In this article (and the next two), you will learn about the various common views that you would likely use in your journey of Android development. In particular, I have categorized the views in this series into the following group:

Basic Views - commonly-used views such as TextView, EditText, and Button views

Understanding User Interface in Android - Part 1: Layouts

weimenglee — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:13:47 +0000

So far in my previous few articles on Android I have focused on showing you how to get things done in Android without really spending too much time discussing the visual aspect of Android application development - User Interface design. In this article, and the next, I will walk you through the various elements that make up the UI of an Android application. In this first part of the article, I will discuss the various layouts available in Android to position the various widgets on your screen.

Effective Design for Multiple Screen Sizes

bryanrieger — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:32:43 +0000

So you're a designer and have been tasked with the design of a mobile web site. Chances are, unless you're designing for only one device you're quickly going to be faced with a common problem experienced by designers who work with mobile devices; figuring out what screen size to actually design for.

For instance:

A Very Modern Mobile Switching Algorithm - Part II

James Pearce — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 11:20:03 +0000

This article follows on from last month's Part I, where we discussed some of the principles of handling mobile users and switching their experiences. If you haven't read it yet please do so before we dive into some of the technical ideas and implementation details.

Mobile Web Design: Getting to the Point - Part II

paulca — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:55:52 +0000

Following on from part I, I want to put into practice the principles that I isolated by looking at GMail, Twitter and Facebook. I’ll apply the principles to one of the most common of web applications: the online store. I want to look at three typical online store pages and then go through some ideas about how best to apply mobile web design principles to the pages.

I'll go through the process of building the site from the ground up... from simple sketches through wireframing and the final design.

Introducing the new DeviceAtlas Data Explorer

James Pearce — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:53:32 +0000

We teased you about this a few months ago and we've now finally finished! DeviceAtlas v2.1 offers analytics tools to explore the mobile device information in its database.

In the video below, James and Andrea give you a teaser of how it works, and talk through some of the cool new tricks.

~~We're going live next Monday, and we'll announce here when it's available.~~ UPDATE: we've gone live.

Mobile Web Design: Getting to the Point - Part I

paulca — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 08:00:30 +0000

This is the first in a two part look at mobile web design. In part 1, I focus on three current 'big guns' of mobile web applications and look at how they solve the problems of mobile web application design by getting to the point. In part 2 I'll get practical and run through a series of steps to design a small sample mobile eCommerce site, applying what was learned in this article.

A Very Modern Mobile Switching Algorithm - Part I

James Pearce — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:39:32 +0000

An important question that most web developers ask when developing their first mobile web site is "how do I distinguish between mobile users and desktop users?". Although this seems like a simple enough question at first, of course there's more to it than meets the eye. In fact, what do we even mean by 'distinguish'? How we distinguish their requirements? Their desires? The services they expect? The browsers they happen to be using?