Android Developers — Visual Design Screencast — Creating custom button assets. DesignBytes: Flattening Existing Icons with Photoshop. Making It a Mobile Web App. Advertisement Ask any interactive agency nowadays what their clients are asking for when they need a mobile experience — the answer will inevitably be “an iPhone and/or an iPad app.” Native Apple apps are a hot commodity, and in today’s mobile application ecosystem, mobile web apps are not sexy.
In fact, many people don’t even realize they are even an option. In certain cases, an iPhone/iPad app will be the right solution for their needs. However, there are some situations where it may become a short-term win, but eventually a long-term loss. Increasing Fragmentation Mobile apps are all the rage. But what about deploying to Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and Symbian? GAP StyleMixer application for both iOS & Android The Mobile Web is Everywhere As the native mobile app market becomes increasingly fragmented, it is becoming clear that there needs to be a solution which can re-use code and designs across platforms, and which eases deployment headaches. Old News The App Store Model (ik)(vf) Designing For Android. Improving App Quality. [This post is by Roman Nurik, who is passionate about icons. —Tim Bray] With thousands of new apps being published in Android Market every week, it’s becoming more and more important to proactively work at breaking through the clutter (hooray for marketing jargon!).
One way of improving your app’s visibility in the ecosystem is by deploying well-targeted mobile advertising campaigns and cross-app promotions. However, there’s another time-tested method of fueling the impression-install-ranking cycle: improve the product! A better app can go a very long way: a higher quality app will translate to higher user ratings, generally better rankings, more downloads, and higher retention (longer install periods).
The upside to having a higher-quality app is obvious. Listen to your users The most obvious way to listen to users is by reading and addressing comments on your app in Android Market. Another way to better listen to your users is by having a public beta or trusted tester program. Android Interaction Design Patterns | Deep dive into responsive mobile design, part 1. November 8th, 2011 It’s time to take a closer look at the design and implementation principles of responsive mobile design, and this will be the first part in a series that will answer three underlying questions: what are we designing, why are we designing it in a certain way and how are we implementing the target design. This series is based primarily on our experience in unifying the two separate code bases that we had for the Android market client – one optimized for small phone screens, and another optimized for large tablet screens.
The main goal is to show the basic principles of designing and developing for a wide variety of screen sizes, ratios, resolutions and form factors. Keep in mind that the Market client UX and UI design used to highlight the specific points is always work in progress, as we continue refining and polishing the application across the entire gamut of supported devices. This is a screenshot of the application details page. What happens on a larger form factor? Android niceties.