Vertically scrolling grid list items are sorted in traditional western reading direction: left-to-right and top-down. When displaying the list, cut off the items in the bottom row to communicate that the user can scroll the list down to show additional items. Be sure to retain this scheme when the user rotates the screen.

Finally out… It took Google just 3+ years to get their official Android design guide lines out.

The new site covers everything you as an Android UI designer or developer needs to be aware of when you design and develop your application user interface.

The site is divided into different sections that cover their creative vision:

“Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) marks a major milestone for Android design. We touched nearly every pixel of the system as we expanded the new design approaches introduced in Honeycomb tablets to all types of mobile devices. Starting with the most basic elements, we introduced a new font, Roboto, designed for high-resolution displays. Other big changes include framework-level action bars on phones and support for new phones without physical buttons.”

These design principles were developed by and for the Android User Experience Team to keep users’ best interests in mind. Consider them as you apply your own creativity and design thinking. Deviate with purpose.

A good section on the site is the Building blocks section that gives you an overview of all the built in controls that you have  The only thing I am missing is a link to how to use these controls. That would have been useful.

The Patterns section gives you a nice overview on how you better can arrange your app, how gestures work, how to use notifications and how to make your app compatible with more devices and form factors.

Getting started? The Android Design site should be your first mandatory stop on your way to create an app.

http://developer.android.com/design/index.html

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

What looks to be my next found watch-love is almost the complete opposite of the Rolex, it’s a high-tech smart-watch that brings back a lot of memories from my early Casio days :)

Italian designer tech company i’m debuted its i’m Watch, which is currently marketed as “the first real smart watch.” The i’m Watch can run nearly anything on its customized Android interface and tethers to your current smartphone to handle phone calls, SMS, music and a host of apps. But the i’m is just as focused on beauty as technological practicality.

So this is a customized Android OS inside a watch with all the possibilities of AndroidOS, how cool is that? :) I’m also has their own i’m-developer program  with their own official i’market for application distribution.

I’m is thinking even bigger and also has a franchise program for people looking to open their own physical ‘i’m store” shops

The i’m watch ranges in price from a low-cost versions that comes in colorful variations called “i’m Color” is  available from €290,- (discounted to €249 while writing) then the middle price version is called “i’m Titanium” or “i’m Tech” that costs €499,-. Finally they also have the “i’m Jewel” version that starts at €9,999. The most expensive i’m Jewel is the “i’m White Gold and Diamonds” that costs €11,999,-.

Only thing I didn’t like here is that every watch comes with a rubber band. I would feel a lot more comfortable having a metal band for this watch but I think I’ll start with a I’m Tech watch to see how it feels.

Here’s a promotional video for the watch:

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Once upon a time there was a small software company called Apple that was loved by all for their brilliant solutions, great software and hardware.  They thrived for years and created more and more stunning iThings that was the must-have for any it-person throughout the planet. All the other less loved companies with bigger revenue and more sales saw that the iThings had become the iThing to bind them all. They put their best minds together and came up with the Thing. At first it was given cold shoulders because it was lacking the “i” in Things. Still Apple grew and gave the world iThings in colorful variations. Sadly for the less loved companies  - they didn’t have colors so like robots they kept developing their Things with more and more awesome specifications but still… there was no “i” in the Things and there was no bright shining colors either.

Fairytale over. People stopped to love the colors and the i’s – They started to see that it was more of a work tool, something to rely on rather than iCandy and the once slim turtlenecked company that had grown fat saw its history repeat itself (hello Newton and messagepad) and called in the lawyers…. If you can’t win them, you beat them, unfair and square.

Apple has a patent that describes the concept of getting a piece of information (like a phone number) visible on your screen and allow you to do something with that information (call someone at the phone number) . With that patent in hand they have now banned HTC from selling their smartphones in the US from 19 April 2012, unless HTC do something about it.

from BBC News: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16258916
from NA24 (norwegian): http://www.na24.no/article3296812.ece 

Why can’t apple spend more time on developing great solutions as they once did, rather than becoming this  Ogre beast bringing lawsuits to anyone remotely close to becoming a competitor? This patent battle (not only from Apple) does nothing but to slow down the overall evolution. Please we need great technology, not headlines about who is suing whom over the location of a power button or its design. Yes, you’ve spent billions on research to get the location right and deserves credit and money for your hard work – but get over it! This is minor stupid stuff!

I use Apple hardware every day and have done so for the last 4 years. The more and more sour taste i get in my mouth associated with the brand is far worse now than it ever was while using Microsoft software the previous 12 years.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

It has been a crazy few months and since last writing, I’ve split with Creuna as a result of us having different opinions on what mobility is, how it is done and how you make business out of it. You do it, not only talk about it :)

I found a partner, and old friend that was working as CEO of Bonnier Media in Norway at the time and started our own company. The result after just a couple of months is that we are over worked and employ four full-time super competent developers in India, a business model I’ll be writing a lot about in the future.

The plan; Create mobile and tablet apps and solutions based on lean and agile methods with offshore resources. It’s a win-win situation for both customers in terms of economy and investment cost, and for us, since norwegian developers is starting to become too expensive for the clients we can provide highly capable and experienced developers at a much lower price.

Another thing I’ll be writing more about is my fondness of my HTC Titan Windows Phone 7 device. I tried a social experiment on myself to see if it “was possible” to live without my iPhone and surprisingly enough the answer was a huge YES. I started out with a Samsung Omnia 7 phone but after a month or so I needed bigger screen and more power so, suddenly I was the owner of one of the best phones I’ve ever owned :)

Check out this Monster Magnet gig i went to and recorded a song from using the Titan (a bit bumpy the first couple of minutes but it will settle down…)

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

I am a huge fan of NFC and I am really looking forward to this technology becoming more mainstream.  Sadly I wouldn’t dare to use it on an Android device in fear of having software with no quality control  that “accidentally” can listen to my payments…. Please  Google, create some control over your applications so that we can trust all this cool technology you are developing!

I think the break of NFC will come with Windows 8 tho.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

With String, it’s not only 2d objects that can be added, you can also add and interact with 3d objects. String is a high performance, Software Developer Kit (SDK) for developers who wish to create true augmented reality applications that can be experienced with an iOS device such as iPad 2 or iPhone.  An Android version is due sometime this fall.

Here’s some of the features of String AR technology.

• Comes in vanilla OpenGL and Unity flavours.
• Add AR to any iOS project, regardless of 3D engine.
• Add AR to your Unity iOS project without a single line of code.
• Unity SDK has preview plugin for lightning fast test cycles.
• Create your own image markers; they’re just PNGs.
• Contains hooks to easily create your own native.

When it comes to performance the frame rate limited only by camera hardware. Typically runs internally at ~70FPS on a 3G, excluding video capture. It can track up to 10 images simultaneously. Lets you mimic real-world lighting in your scene by measuring the relative colour and lightness around each marker. Typically uses ~120 kB of memory at runtime, excluding video capture.

String AR is a commercial SDK and is available through Developer, Indie, Pro and Campaign licensing.

I think that adding this to a marketing campaign would really create a huge WOW effect.  Take a look at the video, It’s not the most advanced option, but it shows how it easily could have been used in a printed ad. If you also add linking to online shopping, this could become the coolest online shopping app ever.

We took String®, our new Augmented Reality technology running on iPhone, out on to the streets of East London. This is the reaction of the public to their first glimpse of AR. And seeing a giant virtual sneaker in the middle of the street of course.

More videos with new content coming soon..

For more information, go to http://www.poweredbystring.com

CREDITS:

Soundtrack: “The Daydream” by Tycho | http://www.tychomusic.com

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

I’ve partnered up with a friend of mine that  did the same in his job, as CEO of Bonnier Media in Norway. Together we’ve started  Appaloosa AS. His expertise is his background in magazine publishing as journalist, editor and business development.

I have for a long time felt that It’s about time to do something on “my own”. That is what I am most comfortable with and enjoy most. I am not saying that working for others has been bad because it hasn’t. I’ve learned a lot and met a lot of people that has become friends, partners and customers, but still, it’s the “be your own boss, do your own thing” I’ve been missing,  and the fact that all I really have done, is trying to make money for some faceless share holders and board also played a role.

So, what will we do? Firstly with our deep “roots” in the publishing business we’ll take our knowledge of content, magazine publishing and technology and offer solutions for digital magazine publishing that doesn’t have a starting cost of $500k. There’s a framework for that, and you most probably have the design skills to do it your self. We’ll teach you about the framework and how to use it, tell you what our experience has thought us about design and layout of tablet content, and then if you need it create some custom code should you want or require it.

The second thing we will be doing is to develop applications for mobile devices, smart phones and tablets based on Android, iOS and Windows.  Android and iOS devices has more or less shared the smart phone and tablet market among themselves so any product provider and/or service provider needs to at least target those two platforms. Traditionally in most app development companies that means a development cost calculation that more or less looks like this “((hours for dev on first platform cost) x 2) – 10% = A lot of money and duplicate application code. If you later  find out that the new Windows Phone devices has taken a third of the market, you need to add the another 90%. In Appaloosa we have decided that it is the features of an application and its ecosystem requirements that decides what development environment to use, but we will as far as possible advice our customers to use cross-platform frameworks like PhoneGap or mono to develop their solutions to save both time and money when there is no technical reason not to use them. 95% of all applications that are being developed for tablets and smart phones will never  meet performance issues that justify the doubled or tripled development cost.

To learn more about the open source framework PhoneGap visit their website. mono is a different kind of framework that let’s you share back end code between platforms and then develop custom UI for each platform, that way you preserver the uniqueness of each platform – it’s user interface. To read more aboutMonoTouch for iOS and Mono for Android visit the Xamarin website.

For developers that want to check out mono I’ve linked to a NDC 2011 season by Jonas Follesø here.

I am really looking forward to spend more time doing development also, I’ve missed it.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Talking about future, in january I wrote about the future of computing, “The PC is dead – long live the PC”  and that is exactly what Microsoft have done with Windows 8. Taking the design concepts from Windows Phone, know as Metro and extended it onto their other platforms like the PC and Xbox. Making everything touch and gesture centric but still with your excepted support for interaction through keyboard and mouse.

You can now create applications that behave and look the exact same (if you want to) on all screens and share content across computers and devices without custom adaptation and development for each and every device/form factor.

I applaud this and congratulate Microsoft on their launch. Apple and Google must seriously step up their game to keep up with this because I think that when 450 000 000 copies of Windows 8 is running on PC’s, and then another multi million figure of tablet devices are running windows 8 with seamless integration the platform choice  more or less becomes obvious for most IT Pros and consumers.

From the developer point of view application (or app(s) as it is called nowadays) developers also has a new way of creating Metro style applications for Windows 8 through HTML5, CSS and JavaScript in Visual Studio 11 and Blend. You can still use all of your familiar technologies from .NET if you prefer that, but everyone that can create a web page is now a Windows Application Developer!. And with the possible reach out to 450 000 000+ computers/users with the click of a button for distribution and marketing - the competition to create the coolest app of the universe will be fierce.

The core of Windows 8 comes with a huge array of sensory features built into the operating system and when the next version (beyond 7.5) of the phone os is being released we will probably see a transition to where you just install windows, not really caring if it’s on a PC, tablet or phone - these sensory features, like the support for NFC just becomes available on all your devices.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

The stylus (or smartpen) looks great too.. Could this phone revive the stylus from its grave? I’ve missed to have a stylus available on my iPad when I am sketching new app ideas or trying to explain things that could easily have been explained with an easy diagram….

Screenshot of features from samsung.com

For me, a perfect screen size and hardware to back it up. I wish that i could have a Windows Phone version of this so I wish it best of luck and hope it becomes a huge success among the Android users.

You can read more on this phone and the announcement made at IFA Berlin on GoMo News and Engadget.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Ran the OSX Lion Boot Camp Assistant today and was scared stiff a few seconds after I rebooted the iMac the first time.

With the Boot Camp Assistant I only partitioned the boot camp disk because i wanted to wait and see if there was any possibility of moving my newly installed VMware Windows 7 image. When i booted the mac it took a while and all I could see was a white screen – then it turned black and a happy message said “No bootable device – insert boot disk and press any key”

I didn’t have any key or a boot disk so I sort of freaked out for a second. I tried to restart the machine with same result, I also tried to press the option key to load the boot disk manager that you do “normally” but nothing happened there either….

The solution luckily was to reset the PRAM. To do that you press 4 keys, option+cmd+P+R while starting the mac. that way you reset the PRAM settings and the computer boots again to your Mac partition.

Thanks to Google and this blog post I found this solution.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

iPhone is deactivated, connect to iTunes

My son just came back from  summer hockey camp and some kids had played with his iPhone 3Gs and his four digit phone lock code. Of course the phone went in panic mode and deactivated itself.

I don’t think that the scenario where someone enters a pin code to many times is such an unlikely event that Apple haven’t tested it, so why the bloody …  can’t they manage to give some understandable feedback on either the phone or in iTunes? Here’s my conversation with the iPhone and iTunes.

iPhone say: iPhone deactivated, connect to iTunes

Me: Ok.

iTunes say: Cannot connect iPhone because it is locked with a passcode.

Me: WTF…

iPhone say: iPhone deactivated, connect to iTunes…

Me: %&%$$%##*

Sometimes you can wonder how Apple got so famous for their usability.

Now, I know and Google will tell you that  I have to put the phone in restore mode and restore the phone from a backup through iTunes. What’s up with that Apple? First, why don’t you tell me that in an error message either on the phone or in iTunes?  and do I always have to carry my computer around for when my phone gets sick? Cos you know you gotta connect to iTunes. Can’t live without iTunes.  Why isn’t there a factory default/reset that doesn’t involve the bloody phone being plugged into something?

Yes, but i CANNOT enter the passcode because the phone is disabled!!!

Argh. :/

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Today, through Mashable I learn that it looks like HP plan to discontinue its tablet and webOS operations altogether, meaning more or less that webOS is as good as dead.

The HP press release regarding this matter say that they plan to discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and all other webOS phones, but that they will explore options to optimize the value of webOS software continuance.

As HP is the ONLY device manufacturer that runs webOS, I find it highly unlikely that they will find any options or ways to optimize the continued life of webOS. I don’t see why a third part device manufacturer would want to choose webOS over Android or Windows Phone.

One laugh from Mashable is that they actually thought it would be an iPad killer ;) nonetheless they write that TouchPad and webOS is the first of more to come that was killed by iPad and iOS.

It was a very short life….. Have there ever been a more short-lived OS?

TechCrunch comments on the HP news here http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/18/apple-wins-without-throwing-a-punch/ There’s also a few posts on This is my next…

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

I love my job and what I do, but need to love my job somewhere else when i can't do it where I am.

The summer is closing to an end and everyone is back from their summer vacations. Life is slowly getting back to normal here in Norway. Myself I started the summer with paternity leave, and saying home with my 9 moths old baby girl called Snø (Snow) We’ll be home together until the end of September, when I’ll be ready to dive head first into what will become the most interesting time of my working career. When I started my leave I took the opportunity to resign and quit my job at Creuna. It was a tough decision but I felt that i did not have any choice in the matter. I really like the people I’m working with and hey are great at what they are doing with front end development for web, but through the last 8-9 months I’ve started to realize (maybe a bit late?) that none of the things I was hired for to do, and was “promised” would ever happen in any foreseeable future, and if I ever was going to get the things done like  I want them to, I had to act now.

As a result, I got in touch with a friend of mine that was stepping down as managing director for a publishing company. He had worked there for several years and felt the time was right to do something new. Together, we made plans to start our own business. It’s time to have more fun at work, and to make money for yourself and not for faceless shareholders eager to make even more money without any understanding of having to spend _some_ money upfront if you want to acquire new knowledge and make business out of that knowledge. It’s like the auto manufacturer one day decides to create jet fighters and hire a few new auto mechanics to design and develop the fighters. Learn by doing, meanwhile we’re selling it.

I was hired to build a kick-ass mobile department and company  awareness around mobile technology, trends and possibilities and I will, only now I’ll do it for ourselves through my own company, in our own image. We’ll build kick-ass smartphone and tablet apps and magazines.

The other great thing happening is for the Windows Phone Developer Community I started two years ago. I had a meeting with Microsoft today talking about how to create an even better community and help it grow, make it interesting to  a wider audience working with Windows Phone as developers and designers. I’ll write more on this later this month but don’t miss out on our upcoming meetup on Thursday 22. September.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

I found it at Hunch.

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post

Smartphone models marked with (-) was either not available for earlier months, or out of the top ten list in later months.

There is an overwhelming amount of Android devices out for sale.  Nearly 60% of all smartphones sold through the NetCom value chain in July 2011 was powered by Android.

I am starting to look forward to the launch of Nokia/Windows Phone devices later this autumn. Will they make it to the top ten list?

Use Facebook to Comment on this Post