Saturday, November 16, 2013

Eclipse ADT Gradle

Still  no word on when we will see Eclipse ADT work with gradle. Hmm, maybe time for an experiment hack up the classpath/project files to get a gradle style build of android projects in Eclipse.

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Web APP vs Mobile App

The core of this is often overlooked or missunderstood. Let me boil it down.
The limitation of screen size combined with the immediatacy of needing to
do something else contribute to the need to lower cognitive loads.
In plain English, help the mobile user get the information with less
thinking because you have a smaller screens and limited resources on a
mobile device. What does this mean?

Navigation, menu items are no longer lists of sections in an area.
you should be using less menu items. That also means you should be using
those visual and other cues that indicate possible actions in a
section of your application with a cohesive set of common actions
that mean the same across all areas of your application.

Another way to rememebr is you see the phrase, give the user the
real object to manipulate. In the case of most mobile applications that real object
happens ot be content within the application.Balance input loads. On desktop the action of clicking a menu or scrolling a page was small as the mouse input system takes a tiny small movement of the
hand and translates that to a large movement on the desktop screen.
Because of the screen space limitations you have no similar input translation on moible and thus
you want to reduce extra user touch movements whenever possible. If you can reduce
7 clicks to do something to 2 than you should strive to do that optimization.

Do not be afraid of experimentation. In the Web application world there is an web application that defies UX conventions, its not pretty visually. It looks like something from the 1990s web in fact. What is hidden is the behind-the-scense appliction of modern html5/css3 to deliver something that works well both in web application form and mobile application form. The web application I am referringto is in fact Craigslist.org.

Craigslist team used the organization of links within their menu system to reduce cognitive loads and eliminate the use of the dreaded dropdown which freed them up to have a UI that is future proffed no matter what new internet tecnlogy comes down the rod as far device form factor, etc.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

KitKat Design change

The big design change I see is not only having the UI highlights match app including the circle of touch color you get when touching something but also the changes to the status bar and actionbar that allow you to more easily make actionbar and status bar transparent and thus revealing your app background. Relax, some already did some thinking on it with work arounds.

The Android PulltoRefresh for native actionbar library already  adjust headerview for the transparency of actionbar so probably have to extend it further. For status bar transparency I guess we need to look at the section for status bar styles in styles.xml for android itself.