I am writing an app and willing to package it for different BlackBerry devices with different properties/features and resolutions.
My problem is how do I go about creating a DeviceConfigurationManager that will give me device specific properties/paddings/margins/resolutions etc? I have read here on SO about using Ui.UNITS_pt for fonts, having multiple images for different resolution devices and other things that has helped me in designing my DeviceConfigurationManager . For example in my buttons I have used margins and so for various devices I kept one device as a reference and relatively returned margins for other devices on width(Display.getWidth()>320) check. But I have seen I still don't get exact perfection for other devices (Buttons set centered for the base device doesn't also get perfectly centered for other devices). Please suggest some other or a better way about designing my DeviceConfigurationManager class. Thanks a lot.
Can't offer too much help - but plenty of sympathy. If you're developing for the BlackBerry Java OS you're just going to have to get used to having lots of boiler-plate to handle the different devices. I suspect you do the same as me; have a class that runs on startup, reads the screen size and then sets all kinds of static params for font sizes, padding etc etc.
Related
We’ve had a recent issue with some asset images, where the Retina #2x version was being used on non-Retina devices. The Retina and non-Retina versions of the assets exist. We’ve tracked the problem down to compression, so we’re able avoid it for now, but if anyone has additional insights, I’d love to hear them.
The icons on the left show how they’re rendering inside the running app. The Retina assets are being used on a non-Retina screen, so they’re being scaled down to 50%, which is causing some blurry edges.
The icons on the right are the original assets.
This is only happening to some assets. Most of the app is okay. We’ve been using ImageOptim to compress the PNGs used in the app. ImageOptim is using a variety of compression combinations for the assets. These are the common best results:
PNGOUT
PNGOUT+AdvPNG
PNGOUT+Zopfli
AdvPNG+Zopfli
The assets that have problems all seem to be using PNGOUT+Zopfli, but not all assets with PNGOUT+Zopfli are bad. I am not 100% confident with this diagnosis though.
Given that the issue isn’t always easy to spot, and given I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, we’ve unfortunately decided to not compress our new PNGs used in Mac apps. This is a shame, because the space savings are good.
We’ve tried a few different Xcode project settings, including turning Combine High Resolution Artwork on and off.
I’d like some answers, but I am also posting here so there’s some information that may help others with this issue, even if I only have a partial solution.
Have you seen this issue before?
If you have seen it, do you have a solution?
By default, NSImage representations are chosen using color type and resolution [1]. In case of PNG files, there are situations when a more generic color type gives a smaller file. This is what causes the mixed color types between representations.
You need to set prefersColorMatch to NO. There are User Defined Runtime Attributes to do it without leaving Interface Builder. This will fix the issue.
How to set prefersColorMatch in Interface Builder
More information about the bug can be found here:
OS X doesn't like mixed types of PNGs.
Retina version of an image always used on non-retina display
It looks like there is no solution, except to force the same color_type for the PNG pairs.
On the iPhone, we design applications around a standard screen size of 320x480. Is there a standard screen size we should use for developing Mac applications, specifically ones targeted to the Mac App Store?
You don't. Desktop computers don't have a fixed size like phones do. Users could have a screen (or two or six) with a resolution anywhere from 800x600 to 3200x2400 or more.
Instead, design your application to be dynamically resizable. Allow the user to resize windows by dragging their corners to make them as large as they want. Ensure that the layout of elements is fluid, and that they move/resize accordingly as their parent window is resized.
Whatever you do, do not try and lock your users into a particular resolution or window size. They will resent it, and your app will not be very successful. You need to abandon the iPhone model when developing Macintosh applications. There are some similarities, but also lots of important differences.
Examine the other applications on your computer, and see how they behave. Good examples are the applications Apple bundles with new Macs, like iTunes, iPhoto, TextEdit, Pages, and Keynote, among others. Certain third-party companies also design award-winning software applications, like Panic's Coda, Fetch, and even Microsoft Office. Hard to go wrong by following their example.
For all modern macs, at least 1024x768 will be usable screen real estate (the actual screen will be larger, but you need to account for menu bars, 16:9, etc.). Still, this is generally not a good question to ask - you should probably have dialogs that look good at 800x600 and scale larger at the very least - most people like to be able to arrange their windows to their preferences, and if you have a large minimum size that will be very annoying.
I am debating whether to hide or not to hide the system tray in a Windows Phone 7 application. I've not found any general suggestions on this issue -the official Windows Phone design guidelines don't address this issue at all - except for Jeff Wilcox's blog post who suggested that he personally likes to see the system tray in applications. I'd like some general advice on this issue from other Windows Phone developers.
Some reasons for showing the system tray are
Doesn't take up that much space
Users may want to see it at times
Reasons for hiding it are
You can't control its background: unless you're using PhoneBackgroundBrush as the background the top row will stand out
Lots of widely used / official apps already hide it: all games as well as the official Facebook and Twitter app.
I'd appreciate all advice on this.
Transparency and colors are now possible with Mango by setting its BackgroundColor and Opacity :
shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"
shell:SystemTray.BackgroundColor="Transparent"
shell:SystemTray.Opacity="0"
I would say by default show it unless it really gets in the way in a way you can't workaround, especially if its an app and not a game.
I would say it depends on the application/game you are writing
If the app needs a network connection or if you will be in the application for a long period of time show it so the user can keep an eye on network and battery.
If you need the extra screen space (for a game?), and you rarely need network hide it.
Or... I guess you leave it up-to the user and give them a setting to programatically hide/show it.
I think its best to use the tray in applications that are tools or utilities. Typically these users would prefer more info than less when they're using applications on the phone (battery, network, time).
Also adding the tray in there tends to make the application look more native on the phone (according to me and others I've asked), which is a big plus because the user associates your app as if it was built with the phone OS.
But if the application is a game, media, etc. type of application I recommend you take it off, especially on panorama because it takes away from the intended design. Also these types of applications focus on the content and seeing multiple little icons at the top can take away from the experience.
Really to me the space it occupies isn't really THAT much, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. But rather the purpose of the app as stated above.
I do like the suggestions that have been given as far as giving the user the choice. Check out this code:
bool ShowTray;
//ASK USER WHAT THEY WANT
//ShowTray = true or false;
SystemTray.IsVisible = ShowTray;
I've been reluctantly hiding, at least on any view where I have a background image; otherwise it looks too strange to me. I've been considering a setting in my app that would allow the user to choose, and persisting that to isolated storage.
Also considering maybe having the top of the screen in phone background brush color and have it fade / blend into another color or background image. Not sure how well that would turn out but as long as it is not a cheesy looking gradient effect, perhaps.
I'm hoping eventually MS will soon add support for transparency in the system tray or otherwise help address this issue. As a user I wish that I could force the system tray to always be visible across all apps, but as a developer I realize that the visual effect often doesn't look good.
Perhaps if the community came up with a new UX metaphor where maybe double-tapping in the system tray area would toggle whether it is visible. A single tap could perhaps start to animate / pop / hint at the system tray...
I have to port a GUI that is currently running on a pc, to a wince device. I have already compiled the code on a win CE platform, the problem is now with the size of the screen of the device which is smaller than some of the dialog boxes of the GUI. I could resize some them in resource view of visual studio 2005. I am unable to proceed further as a lot of screens have bitmaps mapped to them and i cannot just resize the dialog boxes without changing the corresponding bitmaps.
What is the best way to proceed- my last resort would be to disable the bitmaps and redraw them at a later stage.
is there some method of automatically mapping the size of the screen to all the dialog boxes so that they would automatically resize (alongwith the assocaiated buttons etc)
Honestly I think my advise would be to stop and think about the differences between the two contexts before event considering how you would scale the interfaces.
PCs and phones have completely different interaction paradigms and simply scaling from a PC to a phone is very unlikely to work. Even if you could, it's likely to produce an unsatisfactory user experience.
I would expect that the best way to proceed is to sit down and draft up a new UI for the phones. Then bring you back ground code across from the PC and code up the interface part to work with the new UI. If you code is designed according to MVC principles then you are just looking at recoding the controllers and redesigning the views.
Up to now I been using the pda emulator in visual studios 2008 (I am using windows mobile 6.1 professional sdk).
So I just dragged and dropped most of my GUI components into the form. In one instance I made a panel then in this panel I dynamically generated labels in it with certain location positions.
I then put it on my Hp PAQ 110 Classic pda and it looked fine and everything. Then I was looking through the emulators one of them was called professional square. So I decided to run it and when it ran my program it looked like crap.
I had missing labels, missing controls and it just looked horrible.
I thought maybe it would like do some resizing for me but it seems to either did a shitty job or it does not do it at all.
So how do you make a GUI that will work well on all mobile phones(or at least the vast majority of them).
Is there like X number of types of mobile phones? Like the emulator emulates a pda and it works on my HP one so I am assuming that all window mobile device pdas have the same screen size.
Then the next question is how do you make the controls position properly from one device to another? I heard of people using XML files that have all the location position, sizes and etc that they call up and I guess essentially generate the GUI dynamically based on the information in XML.
But I could not find any examples how the XML file would look like, how to detect what phone type it is so that I could call up the right node of the file for that phone.
I am not sure if there are any other ways but this seems better then a set of GUI forms for each one.
Also would it be recommended to have most things in a panel so that way even if the stuff is bigger you can at least turn auto scrolling on.
thanks
I spent a good amount of time looking at different solutions for this problem (see my question here as well) and ended up with a pragmatic approach - consistent use of docking. You have to restrict yourself to the least common denominator, i.e. the lowest resolution you want to support, in terms of how much you can fit on the screen. The good news was that grids always use the entire available real estate, and my forms flow correctly on all devices and the screens don't look like they are broken.
This is far from being an easy task. You can follow some guidelines, but the only thing that will actually work is to always test the User Interface in all possible screen resolutions. Emulators are a good way to start, however it will be better to have an actual device. Some things like font sizes and text readability can only be tested in a real device. So, these are my advices:
Try to use docking for positioning your controls.
You need to be able to handle orientation changes correctly. Using docking helps, but again you always need to test in different screen resolutions.
At some point you will find out that it is inevitable to detect the screen size and adapt the User Interface dynamically. I don't agree that you should restrict yourself to only display what can fit in the smallest screen. A professional application should adapt itself to the available screen size and take full advantage of it.
Structure your application so that it is easy to support new screen resolutions. Make the main User Interface code screen size agnostic. Make it get all information about dynamic resizing - positioning from a configuration class. This way you only need to enhance a single item in your code in order to support a new screen resolution.
And of course:
Test in all possible screen resolutions. After even a minor change to the User Interface, retest.
Eventhough the above posts where helpful this video I found solves all my problems and you don't have to develop for the the lowest screen.
http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/detail/webcastdetails.aspx?seriesid=86&webcastid=5112