Announcing USA TODAY for Android
May 14th, 2009 | Mike Ligon | No Comments
Mercury Intermedia is proud to announce the launch of USA TODAY on the Android platform. This native application offers news, scores, photo galleries at a glance. In addition, users can get weather for their favorite cities or their current location as well as vote on the popular USA TODAY Snapshots, with instant poll results viewable by your state and city.
This application uses some of the best features of the Android OS, including a full-featured rich user interface, GPS, and others, while adhering to the standards of the Android device, making it a comfortable experience for the Android user.
Developing for Android was an interesting experience, as was the challenge of porting from iPhone to Android. We felt strongly that the app itself had to have the look and feel of an Android device, not just create iPhone-ish elements to show up on Android. Some things were easy decisions, such as moving from the bottom oriented TabBarController of the iPhone to the top oriented TabHost in Android. Others were more challenging, such as deciding how to use the physical elements of the G1 (menu button, trackball) vs solely relying on touch screen elements. But all in all, we’re proud of the product, and hope consumers find it easy to use.
We’ve immediately jumped into other projects, but if we can get our heads above water, we’ll post some more of our experiences/pain points/successes.
For more information, go to the Android marketplace on your handset, or go to http://www.usatoday.com/android/
Why build iPhone app mockups in vector format?
March 30th, 2009 | Rusty Mitchell | 2 Comments
In the comments of my previous post “iPhone UI Vector Elements”, one of our readers asked why we would bother going to the trouble to recreate vector versions of the iPhone user interface. It’s a great question which leads to the larger, more general question of why we would create application mockups in vector format at all.
Stick with what you know
First off, just to clarify, I am a designer. I leave Apple’s developer tools to our programmers and stick to the visual tools that I am most comfortable and familiar with. I am fortunate to be in an environment where quality UI and visual design is valued on the same level as rock solid performance, speed, and reliability. Getting my hands dirty with the developer tools has never really been an option. The developers at Mercury Intermedia handle all of the X-Code and Interface Builder work and do a tremendous job.
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iPhone UI Vector Elements
March 24th, 2009 | Rusty Mitchell | 22 Comments
Most of the visuals for our applications start out as vector mockups in Adobe Illustrator. So when we started working on the USA TODAY iPhone app, we went looking for vector UI elements. Although there are a few good Photoshop resources and even a nice OmniGraffle iPhone UI file or two out there, we couldn’t find anything in vector format.
Rather than cry over the lack of good vector elements, we took it upon ourselves to recreate a large portion of the iPhone’s UI elements so we would have them available for future projects. Obviously, we aren’t telling you all of this just to wave it in your face and tell you we have fancy tools that you don’t. Because we care so much about our fellow iPhone developers, we are making our vector files available to you today. (I think I just made myself throw up a little.)
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The 1.1 Transport is Away (and welcome to our blog)
March 19th, 2009 | Mike Ligon | No Comments
Welcome to the Mercury Intermedia blog. We’re going to be posting here from time to time to announce new features and projects, share ideas, explore new topics in development, and share riveting tales about the questionable carpet choices building management made during building renovation.
So the first post here is of the announcement variety. Read More…
