I am working on BlackBerry user interface. But the BlackBerry UIs are less attractive compared to Android UI. I want to make my BlackBerry UI more attractive like in Android.
#Dave Markle is right, this is a fairly general question. Assuming that by 'attractive' you mean 'UI Controls that look better than the default' then you'll have to do a lot of custom control work. More an more in the BlackBerry industry it seems that leading applications are doing almost entirely custom UIs.
I won't touch on specifics of graphic design, that seems outside the scope of SO, but a good place to start is to get a graphics designer to put together some conceptual screens, and then as a developer your job will be to build controls to match that.
There are some tutorials on the net about how to get started with that. I've written a few - "BlackBerry UI - A simple custom field" is a good basic introduction on how to make a custom control.
And a correction to #Dave's comment - you can antialias text on the BlackBerry - though it's not well documented. For example, a 9 pt subpixel antialiased bold font, derived from the default system font:
Font.getDefault().derive(Font.BOLD, 9 Ui.UNITS_pt, Font.ANTIALIAS_SUBPIXEL, 0);
Well, after a couple of beers a lot of things look more attractive... ;-)
But seriously, I think you're going to run into some fundamental limitations with the platform you have. The iPhone, Pre, and (I guess?) the Android all have dedicated graphics hardware which can antialias text and perform complex animations with relative ease. Most blackberries don't.
I generally suggest to people that when they do a design, that they try to stay within the boundaries of the device they're designing for. For example, if you're writing an app for Windows XP, don't try to make it look like it might on a Mac. Stay with the style of the best-of-breed applications on the particular platform you're designing for. Maybe this answer isn't helpful, I don't know... But it was a pretty general question.
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I'm creating a simple Breakout style game and would like a simple way to display the score.
I've been doing some research and found several ways to do text in OpenGL ES, but most methods look fairly complicated.
This looks like it would do the trick, but I couldn't get it to work.
I've looked into FTGL and FreeType, but they look complicated.
I've also read one can display a UILabel over the EAGLContext, but not sure how that would be in the performance department.
I could probably get any of these options to work, I'm just wondering what the best solution is for this situation.
For simple use cases like you're describing, on even vaguely modern hardware (i.e. iPhone 3GS and later, I think), the compositing penalty for layering UIKit/CoreAnimation content on top of OpenGL ES content is negligible. (You can see this if you run your app in Instruments with the "Color OpenGL ES fast path blue" option turned on.)
They say premature optimization is the root of all evil — it's pretty easy to try UILabel, see if it makes a significant difference to your app's performance, and look into third-party libraries and more complicated solutions only if it does.
(Also, it sounds like you might be trying to manage your own CAEAGLLayer. For common use cases, it's a lot easier to use GLKView, plus GLKViewController for animation.)
I'd recommend checking out the Print3D functionality of the PowerVR SDK's PVRTools framework. Print3D is free to use, cross-platform (iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, OS X etc.) and it efficiently renders text within OpenGL ES 1.x, 2.0 & 3.0 applications. The SDK includes an example application with source that demonstrates how to use the Print3D framework (IntroducingPrint3D).
The PowerVR Graphics SDK can be downloaded for free from Imagination's website: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/index.asp
An overview of the source included in the SDK can be found here: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/sdkdownloads/learn_more.asp
There are about four implementations I can think of that are capable of loading SVG graphics into a Delphi application.
One of those, by Mattias Andersson, who is the author of FMX.Canvas.VPR
, works with FireMonkey, but he's not yet prepared to release the code.
A second one, by Martin Walter, works with the VCL, but developer has quit Delphi and has no plans to convert to FireMonkey.
A third one, part of the AGGPAS framework, works with the VCL, but no FireMonkey.
A fourth one is in development by Jason Southwell, but no date has been fixed yet.
So my question: what road to take if I want an SVG component today, without trying to reinvent the wheel a fifth (and probably more) time?
I'm Mattias Andersson -- the author of FMX.Canvas.VPR; I can say that I'm still actively working on the SVG solution. I guess once I have properly added support for gradients and text rendering then I can release a first beta version. I'm relying on TXMLDocument and that is a bit restrictive in what you are permitted to do (IMO), so I've had to invent some workarounds (maybe a better option would have been to implement my own XML class from scratch.) Also, I've had to do some run-time patching of the FireMonkey classes in order to make everything work correctly. The good part is that I'm actually implementing things according to the SVG interface specifications.
The SVG component I've been working on has been released as part of our Apesuite for Firemonkey.
http://arcana.sivv.com/apesuite
Getting involved with Mattias Andersson in the development is the best option:
FMX.Canvas.VPR by Mattias Andersson looks promising and VPR is proven to be an excellent project
No spoon-fed SVG FireMonkey component working out-of-the-box is available as of the time of posting (extensive web search made in general).
You could also consider using Chromiumembedded. Just load the svg in the embedded browser. You can then mix Delphi code with javascript, mix in html and css, etc.
This way, you can just leave it up to Chrome how to draw stuff fast (for example whether to employ gpu acceleration or not).
You'll get proper svg support, it's easy to integrate into your application, it's flexible, and there is lots of documentation and example code available online.
Designing a web application with ASP.NET MVC I asked myself how can I also please those people using a smart phone, ipad, etc.. (everything thats touchable...) and not only a desktop/notebook with a browser.
How can I develop a better user experience.
I would be pleased to hear about technical advises concerning the asp.net mvc framework so I can later implement your suggestions concretely.
There are a few levels of friendlyness. You can start with the basic "does this site render well enough to be usable in a mobile browser?" This really should not be a problem for anything new that is using modern web standards but older sites could have problems. Corallary to this is "is my site a bandwidth hog that takes forever to render over 3g because each page is 14mb of animated GIFs and spaghetti HTML?" Or "does my site make mobile devices melt due to aggresive scripts?" Luckily this set is pretty easy to deal with -- modern websites tend to handle this pretty well by default.
The second level is "does this site do anything maddening from a touch perspective." The big thing that can clip you here is hover based menus -- there is no hover on a touch UI. The other common issue is using small links or buttons that one can't hit at least without zooming in to crazy levels. The solution here is testing -- some issues are obvious to all but you won't see some things until you are interacting without a mouse.
The final level is using a touch UI for fun and profit. If you make it this far, you are doing better than many web publishers in this day and age. What is involved here is using touch-friendly UI tools, such as jquery mobile, to handle swipe events and other touch features to make things work more like one expects with a touch UI. An easy example would be making an image carousel swipe-able rather than having to wait for the buttons.
Make the interface chunky - big icons are easy to click, text is very difficult to touch accurately. Set a minimum size for every element, at the very least as big as the individual keys on an iPhone/android's virtual keyboard and preferably much larger.
Ensure that the most relevant options are near the top, and after that the aim is simply to make it intuitive. Fewer menus are generally better.
Go through my tutorial ASP.NET MVC 4 Mobile Features
create mobile-specific views.
-use the HTML5 viewport attribute and adaptive rendering to improve display on mobile devices.
I was looking into creating iOS-apps (especially for the iPad) with the Adobe-Flex framework. It looks very promising to code apps this way.
Is it possible to create own controls/widgets? In the far future I might want to create my own kind of gantt-calender or whatever. Is something like this possible and are there any good tutorials/book out there?
Thanks in advance!
UPDATE: I want to create iOS Components that I can use in Flex. Controls, that are not aviable by default in Flex. Is that possible? By derivating or something?
UPDATE 2: In the meanwhile I found FlexLib to be useful. How hard is it to create stuff like this on your own? Especially for mobile devices. Are there any good tutorials, books, etc. out there?
Yes, you can create your own Controls in Flex. They are commonly called Components. I suggest you start by reading the Flex Docs on how to do so. There are also plenty of other resources out there. One is a screencast series that I created for The Flex Show. Here is episode 1.
You had asked:
How hard is it to create stuff like this on your own?
It depends on what the component wants to do. The commercial components we've built at www.flextras.com have taken from three to twelve months to build. Our Calendar is built from scratch, but most of the other components extend existing Flex Framework components.
The Flextras stuff are architected for reuse. A "single use" component for a specific app can be built in 1 hour [and up].
Once again, the purpose of a component will affect how long it takes to build.
#chiffre
Ok, maybe I am guessing wrong but "iOS controls" makes me think not to "flex controls".
Anyway with Flex 4.5.1 you can add any controls you want, the only thing that you must count (and this counts a lot) is performance.
Read especially about item renderers since scrolling list is not so fast on iOS and how you can make use of cacheAsBitmap.
Also keep in mind to always use light controls when needed if not extend base controls like UIComponent or Sprite and not Button if you just need a rectangle.
Here are some links
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/06/adobe-air-2-7-now-available-ios-apps-4x-faster.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/mobile-development-flex-flashbuilder.
I'm looking to revamp our mobile site with something simple for phones below the ambiguous smart phone category and something a little more interesting for the phones above this category. I'm not interested in WAP/WML for this project. I'm building a ASP.Net 4 MCV 2 app and using MBDF
What I'd like to know is how best to define this differentiation when using MBDF? Screen size, Javascript, SpportsTouchScreen etc. are all in MBDF along with others but I'm not sure where to draw the line and where the data is most accurate for the broad number of devices.
What do those of you out there developing for this spread of hardware & software split on?
Thanks,
Denis
P.S. I've done my research on xHTML MP1.0 - 1.2 and the best practises for implementation to ensure broad coverage but I don't want to restrict the newer phones out there to what the base line can see.
I personally use simple mobile browser dedection script and limit max screen width to 240px. I also use simple AJAX and JavaScript calls too.
Above setup works fine for 90% of my visitors but my sites aren't business critical sites.
You can try http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ but .net api is not as good as PHP one
So after a bit of testing myself I think I'm going to stick with testing if they support JavaScript and Touch using the MBDF. This line in the sand isn't perfect but it seems like the best out there to me.
Here is a neat little tutorial on Browser Detection using JavaScript
Browser Detection