Showing posts with label user experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label user experience. Show all posts

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps Review

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps
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Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps ReviewHere's why: it's not only a great guide to what makes iPhone apps successful, but what will increasingly be the way to make successful software for any platform. Josh does a fantastic job of getting the reader into the right mindset for creating successful apps.
This is an interface, big-idea, that's why that design works book, not a coding book. Nor is it a "how to market your iPhone app book". That said, the interviews alone with designers of big important iPhone apps about how they really designed those apps is worth the price many times over.
Warning: you will probably spend more on buying apps Josh uses as examples of what he is talking about than you will on the book itself - I guess the skills he developed writing his last book, "Best Iphone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders", gave him five star ability for picking great to awesome apps.
Also, while I almost never buy anymore actual paper books, this one is worth it - the color, gloss stock, painstaking layout and content structure would not be done justice as a .pdf.
I could write a longer review, but I'd rather go back to reading, re-reading, mulling and thinking about the what Josh covered in this book. Can't wait for the iPad book!Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps Overview
So you've got an idea for an iPhone app -- along with everyone else on the planet. Set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dose of personality. This accessible, well-written guide shows you how to design exceptional user experiences for the iPhone and iPod Touch through practical principles and a rich collection of visual examples.

Whether you're a designer, programmer, manager, or marketer, Tapworthy teaches you to "think iPhone" and helps you ask the right questions -- and get the right answers -- throughout the design process. You'll explore how considerations of design, psychology, culture, ergonomics, and usability combine to create a tapworthy app. Along the way, you'll get behind-the-scenes insights from the designers of apps like Facebook, USA Today, Twitterrific, and many others.

Develop your ideas from initial concept to finished design
Build an effortless user experience that rewards every tap
Explore the secrets of designing for touch
Discover how and why people really use iPhone apps
Learn to use iPhone controls the Apple way
Create your own personality-packed visuals
Ten Tips for Crafting Your App's Visual Identity
Choose a personality. Don't let your app's personality emerge by accident. Before you start designing, choose a personality for your app. The right personality for the right audience and features makes an app irresistible and creates a bonafide emotional connection. Tapworthy designs have the power to charm and beguile.
Voices (left) has a Vaudeville personality appropriate to a funny-voices novelty app. iShots Irish Edition (right) creates a gritty dive-bar ambience for its collection of drink recipes.

Favor standard controls. Because they're commonplace, the standard set of controls is sometimes dismissed as visually dull. Not so fast: commonplace means familiarity and ease for your audience. Conventions are critical to instant and effortless communication. Before creating a brand new interface metaphor or inventing your own custom controls, ask whether it might be done better with the built-in gadgetry.
A coat of paint. Standard controls don't have to be dreary. Use custom colors and graphics to give them a fresh identity. This technique requires a light touch, however; don't distract from the content itself or drain the meaning from otherwise familiar controls.
Wine Steward uses standard lists (known as table views in iOS) but creates a vintage ambience by draping a backdrop image across the screen. The app adds a parchment graphic to the background of each table cell, making each entry appear to be written on an aged wine label. The burgundy-tinted navigation bar maintains the app's wine flavor.

' You stay classy. Luxurious textures applied with taste increase your app's perceived value.
' Keep it real. Realistic lighting effects and colors create elements that invite touch and create an emotional attachment. They also provide subtle guidance about what your audience can interact with.
' Borrow interface metaphors from the physical world. Lean on users' real-world experience to create intuitive experiences. People will try anything on a touchscreen, for example, that they'd logically try on a physical object or with a mouse-driven cursor. Besides these practical benefits, using an everyday object as an interface metaphor imbues an app with the same associations that folks might have with the real McCoy--a shelf of books, a retro alarm clock, a much-used chessboard, a toy robot.
' Don't be afraid to take risks. Make sure your interfaces are intuitive, sure, but don't be afraid to try something completely new and different. Designers and developers are hatching fresh iPhone magic every day, and there's still much to explore and invent. While you should look hard at whether you might accomplish what you need to do with standard controls, it's also worth asking, Am I going far enough?
The app icon is your business card. The icon carries disproportionate weight in the marketing of your app, and it's important to give it disproportionate design attention, too. Be descriptive more than artistic. Make your app icon a literal description of your app's function, interface, name, or brand.
Use a dull launch image. Disguise your app's launch image as the app background for a faster perceived launch. Always cultivate the illusion of suspended animation when switching in and out of your app.
Be kind to new users. Provide simple welcome-mat pointers for first-timers. Beware of more complex help screens; they're warning signs of an overcomplicated interface.

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Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics Review

Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics
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Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics ReviewDino Esposito's book, "Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, Applications," is best described as a second volume of "Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, Core Reference" (also Microsoft Press, 2006). Opposing industry trends in computer books, Microsoft Press does not publish a table of contents for potential readers. Unless readers can inspect a copy at a bookstore, as I did, they will have difficulty deciding whether the book has content useful to them.
The two volumes combined are about equal in coverage to "Professional ASP.NET 2.0" from Bill Evjen and four others (Wrox, 2006). Esposito's strategic emphasis is not as significant for the "Applications" volume as it was for the "Core Reference" volume. The second volume mainly covers additional class libraries, such as those for "web parts," that are more likely to be of use in commercial portals and sales sites than in professional, Web-enabled applications. However, it is in this "Applications" volume rather than in the "Core References" volume that Esposito presents such critical topics as the ASP.NET 2.0 resource, role and image management services and the tree and menu controls.
In Esposito's two volumes combined one gets about 1,550 pages at twice the price of about 1,250 pages from Evjen, et al. Besides about 300 more pages, what one gets in return for the extra cost is coverage of some extra topics, such as resources, and generally clearer and more consistent descriptions of ASP.NET 2.0, free from gushing enthusiasms. Esposito also provides tables of properties and methods for the major classes. The items in these tables are the same as those in Microsoft's documentation, as furnished with the Visual Studio tools and available without charge on the Web, but often Esposito's explanations are both clearer and more detailed than Microsoft's opaque and perfunctory style.
Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics Overview
Discover how to:

Fine tune the ASP.NET runtime and control configuration settings
Build custom providers to replace or enhance native components
Develop rich applications with mobile controls, the site navigation API, GDI+, and other .NET Framework facilities
Use asynchronous pages, dynamic expressions, and page parse filters to enable complex application functions
Create custom Web Parts for personalized, portal-like Web sites
Define ASP.NET templates and work with the Repeater and DataList iterative controls
Develop and deploy user controls to partition and reuse common interface elements
Design custom data-bound controls

Get code samples on the Web


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