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by Fred Grott.
Original Post: UI Design for Touch Screens
Feed Title: ShareMe Technologies LLC-The Mobile Future
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I guess I should explain why this upcoming UI re-factoring is taking so long. First, let's put my biases out there. I have contributed to UI libraries in the past in mobile such as SynclastUI which was the MIDP1.0/MIDP2.0 transition. I have also been recruited/interviewed or some mobile product teams such as Yahoo Go. while I may have a different opinon about the underlying implementation they may be valid at some point.
Before touch screens we had it easy as UI developers in that we could get lazy an djust take up more room with two menus when one was not enough. For eample Yahoo GO v3 while the first screen uses one menu for al the services:
the screen for each service than uses two menus:
which of course will not work for any touch screen device. Why not? Both Apple iPhone and Android and now Palm WebOS reserve that bottom space for other menu items or system additional menu cues. The other aspect is when you switch to Landscape mode or in other words virtual keyboard mode that space has to be there for that virtual keyboard if needed as all three platorms are modifiable of whether they come with a keyboard or not except for Apple iPhone which has no real keyboard ban on its iPhone.
Thus, it now becomes important to fit two menus into the top placement. Thus, you might have from left to right page-leaf back navigation, than the status panel area in the middle and the main app menu in the right aligned side.
Thus, during the week I have been playing with each UI set-up I tried thus far how it works with set-ups with a real keyboard and those with virtual keyboards, and etc. Thus, now its finshing up all the changes and completing some demo videos over the weekend.
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