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Cicada Principle

cynthusia — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 17:00:34 +0000

Very cool article on the Cicada Principle and Web Design.

Designing for Android

cynthusia — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:10:09 +0000

I recently read this article from Mobile Marketer – so true. i do love prototyping, but yeah – huge headaches. i hate testing and documenting the tests!

“Those nice little comps won’t cut it anymore We digital marketing natives have spent much of our careers mocking up ideas in Photoshop quite successfully.

Clients get to see what we are dreaming of and see the processes and workflows behind the vision. Those days are long gone now that we are living in a mobile application universe.

The linear “backwards and forwards” experience that was once “enough” is now uninspiring to clients, at best, and misleading, at worst. It often leaves too much to the imagination. And in this context, imagination can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. The solutions?

Good old-fashioned prototyping, giving the comps the animation and interactivity they need for the client to truly embrace the vision.

Creating a light-weight proof-of-concept gives us the opportunity to refine and polish a concept to perfection.

Also, “Motion Studies” are becoming a powerful tool, along with static comps, to show how screens get rendered and how data moves or becomes animated.

Sound painful? Well, it can be. After all, you could be building something that may or may not get the green light.

What is more, you have to involve everyone from UX, to design, to development and QA from the very beginning to educate them on the concept and achieve full conceptual buy-in if you hope to have flawless execution.

Though an investment, it is truly worth it to avoid clients becoming dissatisfied when they finally see what the content, interaction, and movement look like together far later in the development cycle. ”

- http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/columns/9149.html

light-weight alternatives to device detection

cynthusia — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 02:24:32 +0000

while doing the DeviceAtlas API tutorial, i ran into a path/permissions issue on my server that i am unable to get around. I could just work locally via MAMP, but I wanted to test the site with the emulators on ready.mobi.

so today i investigated some light-weight alternatives to device detection. here’s some stuff, though i haven’t dug too deep yet:

and i’m wondering how many alternatives there are to DeviceAtlas….

and, if strictly developing WordPress sites, there are always mobile switcher plugins available:

OOP, and the DOM, and JavaScript oh my!

cynthusia — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:05:48 +0000

i am currently brushing up on the basics… which are not so basic to me, but i’m getting there. i realize i understand a lot of computer science concepts, but don’t yet have the ability to define them in my own words. for example, JSON. we use it at work for mobile device detection paired with DeviceAtlas, and i know kinda how to get around in it, and i know kinda what it’s doing – but all very vaguely. if someone were to ask me to explain it, i probably couldn’t. hence today’s lesson.

just some random things that are helping me (and apparently i need to get cracking on my custom WordPress theme for this blog, as this video embed clearly demonstrates):