i'm working on an app that records audio. the sample is saved on the sd card. At the moment my UI just has the buttons to record,play and reverse the sample. what i'd like is a way to specify a file name for the sample and a menu to play previously recorded samples. could someone tell me which widgets would be best for this. i'm thinking textbox/keyboard, context menu or some sort of list. not sure of the terminology.
thanks
I would really recommend this:
Google IO 2010 - Design Patterns - Video
If you don't have that much time just check the slides:
Google IO 2010 - Design Patterns - Slides
Video is much more comprehensive though!!! Good luck!
Me and others already answered some sort of a similar question here:
Prettifying my Android App?
Buttons are the best components to use. Who'd disagree on that? :) You ask us to design a UI layout for you? Be more specific. Check out the available UI widgets and design something nice. It's your app.
Related
I found Tag-Cloud but I think it is not yet ready. Does anyone have any word cloud generator libraries available that allows you to customize it's design?
I have found this and it seems usable:
https://github.com/sschwieb/Cloudio
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Zest/Cloudio
https://code.google.com/p/memeplex/source/browse/trunk/Android/src/kr/ac/yonsei/memeplex/view/TagCloudLayout.java?r=31
Though it might need to be changed or edited a little. I hope somebody can help me. I will be offering bounties in the next few hours
If you can offer any algorithms I will gladly study it as well.
Thanks in advance!
Depending on what your actual requirements are, you could use a really nice and customisable javascript word cloud written in D3 like https://github.com/jasondavies/d3-cloud and then embed it in a WebView in your Android app. There is an example on how to do that at https://github.com/mitchwongho/D3Android
Here is a simple example I made demonstrating this https://github.com/rbarbantan/android-word-cloud
I am looking to start writing apps for mobile devices. I know a little about this subjec, and I am proficient in both java and python. However, before jumping into creating apps I wanted to get the community's input on a question I have not yet found the answer to:
How/Where should I begin?
I understand this question is fairly general/basic for a community that focuses on solving/debugging complex programs, but if there is a recommended tutorial (or specific platform) that will help a beginner(such as myself), it would greatly reduce the frustration and amount of monotonous questions asked on this forum and others.
Regards
Coursera is offering 3 courses all using android development which started last week. That would be an excellent starting point for anyone:
https://www.coursera.org/specialization/mobilecloudcomputing/2
How/Where should I begin?
I don't know about you, but I often learn by example more than reading. You mentioned that you're proficient in java so thats a great start. After you understand the Android SDK it's really only the UI good practices you need to learn. So here's my suggestion.
Start off with something super simple. Let's say, create your own version of a calculator. Something that can add, subtract, multiply, and divide. This should be dirty, ugly, but works correctly.
After doing this, take a look at some other android calculators on the play store. Check out Simple Loan Calculator. I use this example because it offers a lot of android UI components. ViewPager, ActionBar, etc. Download this app, take a look at it, and try to mimic it. This should provide an idea on how to work with the android UI components.
What's next? After you have done these two apps you should be relatively ready to tackle your own project.
HTML apps are easy to port across multiple mobile platforms. I have set up an Android HTML template as a starting point. You can just import this project into Eclipse and take a look at that.
https://github.com/jakewp11/HTML5_Android_Template
Here is my experience for ios,
There are three things that I consider as pillars
Objective C
Memory managment
Design patterns
The first one looks obvious but I'd stress on learning concepts like protocols, categories, extensions. As a beginner I thought that learning the syntax was enough, but time and again I had to jump back to the language concepts to understand what's going.
The memory managment , the most talked and confusing subject and now since we have automatic referenc counting to make things simpler and often new Dev skips learning memory concepts (I did it). So I suggest you to have an idea what actually happens under the hood of arc " the manual memory managment"
The design patters,
When I started off , to pass data and control , what I used to do was achieve every thing through the only design patten I knew (target action) . I lack the knowledge of design patters didn't how easily I could achive better results with less code.
Some resources:
Dev.apple.com
http://www.raywenderlich.com (one of my best tutorials are here, you can find one on design patterns)
http://rypress.com/tutorials/objective-c/
And yes , the sample projects at Dev.apple are the best tutors.
We have an IOS/Android app that is being redesigned and we're really happy with it,
Since IOS7 we are able to be more creative in terms of UX/UI and it's really wonderful.
My problem is with Android, it IS my favorite platform both in terms of Development possibilities and general ideology but for some reason it's lacking the rich content world of IOS.
We've designed a sidemenu with the following effect which is really amazing and we love it, but we can't recreate it for Android, i've consulted with several developers and they all gave me the same answer "it's a system limit".
My question is - Is it possible to recreate those effects in Android, if not then why (what's the actual limit) and if Yes, then what am i missing ?
We've designed a sidemenu with the following effect which is really amazing and we love it
You're welcome to your opinion. Personally, that would drive me nuts, and I have no idea what benefit it would give users over a regular navigation drawer.
Is it possible to recreate those effects in Android
It is unclear what specific effects concern you.
Can you resize content, such as the original content shown in the video? Yes.
Can you slide content, such as the original content shown in the video? Yes.
Can you fade in content, such as the items of the menu? Yes.
All of this is covered in the documentation. Particularly if you are targeting API Level 14+, property animation is usually the way to go, and you can try NineOldAndroids for a partial backport of those capabilities if you need to support earlier API levels.
If I missed concerns of yours, please comment, or perhaps edit your question.
To put it bluntly, user experience.
Providing an experience consistent with the Android operating system is a Priority for Google and by placing some limitations on the way you develop the UI of your app it can ensure an experience that is familiar from app to app.
You can see the UI guidelines here:
http://developer.android.com/design/get-started/ui-overview.html
Out of interest have you had your app approved by Apple yet?
Also.. Android does allow you to use a "Sliding Drawer" menu which is very similar to your effect which you could use to meet your goals (without the effect of course).
Check out the below mentioned git project. It has so many slide menu styles/animations. You can use the one you want or customize as per your need.
https://github.com/jfeinstein10/SlidingMenu
Check the below android app for the above mentioned GIT project
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.slidingmenu.example
I'd like to develop apps for Android after 2 years of developing iPhone apps. First of all, I'm not a programmer. I'm a UI designer and usability engineer with basic knowledge of app programming. I have a colleague doing the part of the programmer. So my first look into the documents on developer.android.com titled "UI design" resultet in surprise. No real design guidelines, just clutter about coding, no concrete hints how apps have to look like what you are expecting when you read "UI Design". OK - Android is a very open system for many different hardware types - maybe a little bit hard to give advices that fit for all systems - but not impossible. Let's look at e.g. Symbian - it's relatively open too and they have this: forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/8299c7a4-d3d8-4c4c-b62e-97a4c831e6a3/User_Experience_Evaluation_Model_v1_1_en.pdf.html
Great help, good basics!
Apple has this: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/Introduction/Introduction.html
Examplary done!
Now I am searching for the equivalent document for Android UI Devs (again, not the programming part). This one looks great: developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html
but it does not cover all scenarios and sooner or later gets lost in advices for coding.
I'm looking forward to your help.
Many thanks and best regards.
I think those at http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html are the only ones at the moment, quote: The Android UI team has begun developing guidelines for the interaction and visual design of Android applications. Look here for articles that describe these guidelines as we release them.. So it sounds like there will be more in the future but they haven't finished them yet.
You can also find some information here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/index.html
In general, I don't think Google has a different mindset than Apple when it comes to design so I doubt there will ever be as much official material.
There's a document called androidhig.pdf that seems to be someone that has just created a set ot reasonable guidelines themselves by adapting the IPhone ones, I can't find any download link for that document now, but if you google for the file name you can do quickview on at least one of the links to see the contents of the file.
Google has launched a brand new site with Android UI and design guidelines.
As #ho1 notes, HIG is very much a work in progress. In addition to those suggestions, I'd recommend a recent blog post on UI design patterns, which I found enlightening.
EDITED ADDENDUM: UI design patterns were also described at the I/O conference, available as video.
I'm writing a new app for android and I would like to implement also a first launch tutorial. In particular, the tutorial has to be interactive. Basically, after a user registers to the service, a minimum settings will be required.
I'd like something like today we have into Google Apps, like Sheets, Docs and so far. The exception there is that those tutorials have the aim to explain how the app works. Here I want to have something where user can input some data.
I was looking at ShowcaseView but seems to be deprecated and old in style.
So here the question is: what is the best way to implement that? ViewPager?
I also had a look to this other question, but it did not help too much.
Any advice is really appreciated.
EDIT: I have found this other nice alternative. AppIntro It seems what I was looking for. :)
There are few I found by quick searching Github:
https://github.com/Seishin/showcaseview-android
https://github.com/worker8/TourGuide
https://github.com/amlcurran/ShowcaseView
I'm pretty sure you can find the right one for you ;)
You can do it in several ways that really depends on you and your app. Basically you can create a "Boarding" experience with ViewPager that will go thru the main screen of your app (with static images for example) where you explain the user what goes on in your app. The other way way is an interactive tutorial as the user already landed into your app - you can achieve this with something like Showcase (I'm pretty sure that there are libs on GitHub that are still maintained).
I would recommend Roman Nuriks Wizard Pager code on Github as a starting point. It's not so much a library as a sample code showing you how to do what you want.
The general approach is to use a ViewPager with some form of navigation buttons to move the user forwards and backwards through the pager Fragments.
https://github.com/romannurik/Android-WizardPager