Good afternoon, habrayuzer!
Just about the other day, another translation book of O'Reilly publishing house should leave the printing house.



Title : Mobile Development. Template Gallery
By : Teresa Neil
Translation of the book : Vadim Chernik
Release date : just the other day
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Designing mobile application interfaces is one of the most interesting stages of mobile development. In this edition, examples of specific applications show successful and unsuccessful decisions of developers. The big plus in the book is that the author does not focus only on Android and iOS, but also affects platforms such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In total, the book covers more than 70 templates, which is quite a lot for 208 pages. Of course, some of the applications at the time of the transfer will have changed and even, maybe, more than once. On the other hand, the essence of the book is not to consider the most recent “ups”, but to understand / learn the essence or deepen the knowledge in designing user interfaces.

Who is this book for?

Let's just say that if you are a confident designer / manager / developer with many years of experience who have developed more than a dozen applications, then this book will seem simple and useless to you. But for beginners, this book is a must. Author Theresa Neil describes a large number of “no-water” design patterns. She does not pay attention to the theoretical part (what and when the first came into being), but only practical. The author has divided the design patterns into 10 categories, which she clearly describes.

1. Navigation
2. Forms
3. Tables and lists
4. Search, sort and filter
5. Tools
6. Charts
7. Invitations
8. Feedback and possibility of action
9. Help system
10. Anti-patterns

Fragment of the chapter "Tools"

Toolbar

The toolbar, also called the action bar, contains tools for screen-level actions. In Pandora, the toolbar includes commands for switching to a list view, assigning a rating to songs, setting a song to pause and skipping a song. A + Picture Effects for BlackBerry also provides a toolbar that allows you to perform typical actions (Fig. 5.6).


Fig. 5.6. Pandora and A + Picture Effects

In the iOS operating system, to stylize the panel by default, light blue is used, but a different color is also possible (Fig. 5.7).


Fig. 5.7. The default iOS toolbar and the styled toolbar in Trip Journal (color inset)

Sometimes actions may have additional commands that need to be displayed. The operating system neutral approach to displaying the commands of the selected tool is to use the cascade menu. This technique is used in many mobile applications to display editing and formatting commands (Fig. 5.8).


Fig. 5.8. QuickOffice Pro and Document To Go

Evernot uses a different approach to provide a rich set of text formatting commands — a nested panel that remains visible all the time (Figure 5.9).


Fig. 5.9. Evernote

Drop-down menus with buttons in iOS are another way to offer users additional commands related to the selected tool. An example of their correct implementation can be seen in Pulse, where four different versions of how you can tell a particular story to other people are displayed. The creators of Yelp and Ibis went in the wrong way, using drop-down menus with buttons to display on screen, respectively, the sorting and filtering options (Fig. 5.10). More suitable approaches to sorting and filtering can be seen in Chapter 4.


Fig. 5.10. Pulse, Ibis and Yelp

Book on piter.com