I just came across this helpful collection of Android UX Pattern wireframes and examples. This is an essential reading for anyone starting Android design / development.
Top 6 Help Design Patterns for iPhone Apps
Users of most of the iPhone applications often use first-time use help screens to help users learn how an app works. This help can come in a wide variety of styles: demos, tutorials, single screen overlays, walkthroughs, tips, or short screen summaries.
Below is a look at how different apps have leveraged these help patterns to introduce functionality to their users upon first use.
1. Demos
A demo animates a series of screens showing the primary functions of the application. This can come in the form of an animated walkthrough in which key interface elements are called out within each screen, or in the form of a short (up to 30 seconds) video demonstrating functionality.
2. Tutorials
Tutorials allow the user to tap, scroll, and/or swipe through static images of the application that point out key interface elements and interactions.
3. Single Screen Overlays
Single screen overlays serve to point out key interface elements in context of viewing a specific screen. The overlay is typically used to explain the use of 1-5 controls in a way that is quickly read and then dismissed.
4. Walkthroughs
Walkthroughs help users learn actions used throughout an application by guiding users to complete a task step-by-step. Walkthroughs help users accomplish a task quickly. By doing so, walkthroughs encourage additional application use and exploration.
5. Tips
Tips provide the user with descriptions of functions within an application. Tips are generally displayed one at a time, with the ability to optionally view additional tips. Tips can appear either appear immediately upon launch, or appear upon the user actively opening a tips screen or overlay.
6. Single Screen Summaries
Single screen summaries are a very basic way of introducing what you can do on each of the app’s primary screens. An overlay containing a very short amount of text appears for a couple of seconds that describes what the screen represents. This overlay is typically only displayed once upon first visit to the screen and does not return upon subsequent visits.
Read full article @ http://www.inspireux.com/2011/02/07/top-6-help-design-patterns-for-iphone-apps/
Tagged Apple, iPhone, User Interface
Screentaker creates iOS app action shots in seconds
If you’re creating an app or promoting one for a friend or client, nothing quite makes the software pop like showing off screenshots on iOS devices. If you’re decently skilled with Photoshop, it isn’t too hard to do, but a new Mac App Store title lets you create pro-level mockups in a matter of seconds.
Screentaker ($4.99) from developer Fabian Kreiser lets you drag and drop screenshots taken on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch onto a simple window, choose from device and display options using drop down menus, and output a finalized screenshot ready for your website or display ad in no time at all. The app detects what device the screenshot came from automatically, but you can also override this and choose yourself.
Aside from device frames, you can also choose to remove the status bar (useful if you don’t want carrier or time info distracting from the app itself), and add a thin border and shadow to iPhone screens, among other options. Enterprising users can also create their own plugins for Screentaker to add their own custom effects to the options already available.
If you’re a developer, you can also grab screen captures from the iOS device simulator that comes with Apple’s suite of development tools, so that you can mock up how an app will look on a device before it’s ready to be deployed. This is especially handy for selling your early-stage projects to investors or clients.
Resulting files are in .PNG format, with background transparency preserved, so you can plug them into whatever graphic presentation you need to easily. As someone who regularly uses iOS screenshots, I’m happy to have found such a neat little tool that will add a little more visual appeal to app reviews and profiles, and I’m sure devs will welcome this time saver even more.
Tagged Apple, User Interface
6 companies doing big data in the cloud
Cloud computing and big data analytics are a match made in heaven. I’ve explained why before, but essentially it’s because the cloud model lets users leverage a service provider’s infrastructure investment and subject-matter expertise without having to build them in-house. Done right, big data in the cloud is like a marriage of managed services and Software-as-a-Service, only using very powerful software.
Thankfully, big data and the cloud have already found each other. Although it’s still very early in the evolution of this combination — experts predict major investment in this area going forward — several companies have already melded the two into a variety of unique services.
Quantivo. Quantivo just announced its foray into the space Tuesday with a cloud-based version of its analytics platform. The platform combines business data from multiple sources, transforms and enriches it, then lets customers work with it via Quantivo’s specialized interface. Because knowing the right questions to ask is often one of the more difficult aspects of big data, Quantivo says its technology also takes some of the guesswork out of the process by “intelligently auto-compiling lists of patterns” in customers’ datasets.
1010data. 1010data actually has been doing big data as a service for more than a decade, before anyone was talking about the cloud. It provides a variety of services for specific big data use cases, including data warehousing, business intelligence advanced analytics. Although 1010data utilizes Hadoop and other traditional big data tools to power its service, its Customers interact with the service using familiar tools such as spreadsheets that make it easier to find the connections and trends they’re looking for.
Opera Solutions. Opera Solutions is an interesting company, because although it’s doing $100 million in revenue a year,relatively few people have heard of it. But its service is pretty compelling: Customers upload their data to Opera’s platform, which then analyzes it and delivers results based on the relevant “signals” in a customer’s data set. Not content with providing generic analysis to customers, Opera focuses on each customer’s specific needs and employs experts in a variety of industries to help it cater unique analytics programs for each customer.
IBM. IBM has seemingly limitless options in terms of providing big data analytics as a cloud-based service, but its current strategy appears centered around Hadoop. When IBMlaunched its SmartCloud cloud computing platform in April, it promised that Hadoop workloads will be part of it. A likely candidate to provide that capability is InfoSphere BigInsights, IBM’s Hadoop-based software for analyzing and visualizing large quantities of unstructured data. BigInsights previously was available as a service on IBM’s test-and-development cloud that SmartCloud replaced.
Amazon Web Services. AWS isn’t providing actual analytics as a service, just the parallel processing framework and computing power necessary to do them at scale. Its Elastic MapReduce platform is a cloud-based Hadoop implementation onto which users port their Hadoop applications, then upload their data and run the workload. Like all things AWS, customers only pay for the resources used while the job’s running, as well as for storing the data in AWS’s S3 storage service.
HPCC Systems. LexisNexis spinoff and Hadoop alternative HPCC Systems plans to give customers cloud-based access to a system running the company’s HPCC data-processing software. During an interview during Structure 2011, CTO Armando Escalante noted the company might even offer up its own massive data sets — which span the financial, legal and intelligence sectors, among others — to be processed by customers’ applications.
6 companies doing big data in the cloud
By Derrick Harris
http://gigaom.com/cloud/6-companies-doing-big-data-in-the-cloud/
Tagged Cloud Computing
Apple ‘Reinvents’ our 12 year-old ActiveEdge UI
Apple - Active Edge UI
Way back in 1998, Jobe and I dreamed up a new type of interface – perfectly suited for mobile devices. We called it Active Edge. The patent was granted in 2002. It resembled the touch interface that is currently the rage, but was confined to the 4 borders of the display. The user could control the device simply by interacting with the bezel of the display. (Above are sample screens and a device prototype by industrial designer Laura Mahan)
An active edge user interface includes dynamically configurable flexible touch areas positioned near the perimeter of a display to support interactive communication between a user and a user environment for flexible active touch areas surrounding a display. The interface allows for multiple levels of sensitivity, texture, key travel, and varying widths of active touch areas based on the user environment.
As a bonus, the Active Edge UI contained piezo-electric plates to simulate effects such as physical bumps or accelerating scrolling. Alas, Nortel decided not to build this.
Today, Apple is granted a patent on essentially the same invention – 12 years after our original filing! Their ‘touch sensitive bezel’ is described as
An electronic device has a display and has a touch sensitive bezel surrounding the display. Areas on the bezel are designated for controls used to operate the electronic device. Visual guides corresponding to the controls are displayed on the display adjacent the areas of the bezel designated for the controls. Touch data is generated by the bezel when a user touches an area of the bezel.
Tagged Apple, User Interface