I’m sure right now, some of the adventurous developer will be rushing in to develop their own Iphone apps whether it’s pure apps , web-app or web-app compiled into native app.

Well for those developing web-app and native compiled web-app, you might wanna skip the phase of designing UI themes and just settled with one standard ones but, the problem is, unlike native apps – web apps doesn’t have that kind of build in graphics and text to use as it uses the web technologies like CSS and image files. Fortunely, good news for all developers out there. Check out Universal iPhone UI Kit project. A mini prebuild CSS suitable for all Iphone and Iphone touch platform and also, it comes with all the standard cocoa looking images. Sweet!

Just download it and make reference to the css and image folder. You can start editing index.html and start  your quest in app development.

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This is to be used when there’s an explosion in the game. The class allows you to create explosion effect based on number of particles, size of distance and alpha. All you need is to instantiate it and pass in the variables needed. See sample below.

Download the source here, when you use make sure you have to use the movie-clip from the library folder as well.

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Well, the Principles of User Interface Design are intended to improve the quality of user interface design. And this has nothing to do whether you are an expert programmer, hardcore developer, famous designer and etc.

This article is merely to share with you all out there that trying to develop or design something for client or end-users. Consider yourself by following at least 1 or 2 of this principles as helping mankind. Well enough chatter, and let us begin..

The principles of UI I was yapping about are as follows :-

• The Structure principle: Design should organize the user interface purposefully, in meaningful and useful ways based on clear, consistent models that are apparent and recognizable to users, putting related things together and separating unrelated things, differentiating dissimilar things and making similar things resemble one another. The structure principle is concerned with overall user interface architecture. E.g. UI consistency, distinctive buttons, most active or used buttons are place nearer to the mouse and etc.
   
• The Simplicity principle: The design should make simple, common tasks easy, communicating clearly and simply in the user’s own language, and providing good shortcuts that are meaningfully related to longer procedures. E.g. one click at a iconic big button that instructs the computer to performs multiple complex tasks.
   
• The Visibility principle: The design should make all needed options and materials for a given task visible without distracting the user with extraneous or redundant information. Good designs don’t overwhelm users with alternatives or confuse with unneeded information. E.g. introducing subtle indicator prior to user action / response is a good sign on visibility (tool tip or mouse indicator) or clearly distinguish the click-able stuff and disabled stuff.
  
• The Feedback principle: The design should keep users informed of actions or interpretations, changes of state or condition, and errors or exceptions that are relevant and of interest to the user through clear, concise, and unambiguous language familiar to users. E.g. message or indicator that appears to reinforce the action committed, for example, message of showing records are deleted.
• The Tolerance principle: The design should be flexible and tolerant, reducing the cost of mistakes and misuse by allowing undoing and redoing, while also preventing errors wherever possible by tolerating varied inputs and sequences and by interpreting all reasonable actions. E.g. double verifying orders for something that is irreversible is a good idea to have. For example, This will delete all your save files, Proceed ?
• The Reuse principle: The design should reuse internal and external components and behaviors, maintaining consistency with purpose rather than merely arbitrary consistency, thus reducing the need for users to rethink and remember. E.g. reusing of same submit and cancel button that appears consistently at the same spot is good idea of reuse principle.

Last but not least, like all the robotic /computer laws. There are two laws that applies in user interface design because, we are making something to be used on a computer:- 

First Law :-

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inactivity, allow your work to come to harm.

Example, of 1st Law Violation
Imagine, a worker accidentally deleted entire database record of all citizens of the country in the immigration dept, just with one click. Resulting, him being fired and traumatize for live because, the developer that develop the system didn’t cater for tolerance.

Second Law :-

A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

Example, of 2nd Law Violation
No indication of the server is busy, makes the player go wondering what has happened to his PC assuming it’s hang / crashed. He/she spends hours diagnosing the problem or restarted the PC innocently. Again this is because, the developer didn’t cater for feedback and visibility or auto-assumed this is a designers fault.

 

I really hope this article will enlighten you that such precaution step do exist in our development / design life cycle and should not be ignored just like that. Happy New Year from IGS and good luck in your projects!

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Every wonder that, there’s something to display your run-time variables smoothly without using the laggy trace. Not to say trace command is useless, but at times is much less cpu intensive to debug values especially on enterFrame run time to an on screen textbox instead of using trace.

But, lately I stumbled upon a good console interface like debugger called Flash Console in a form of as3 class package!

Aside from the being able to watch your values real time , it also came with various handy feature such as.

• Command line
• Display info/properties checker (known as Roller)
• RunTime Measurement Ruler

All you need to do is to import the class into your main.as and attach C (the singleton class) method startOnStage.

import com.atticmedia.console.C;
C.startOnStage(this, "");
 
// To debug a value
C.info(variableName);

If you are interested click here to get it .

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Need more sound effects for your multimedia or game project ? More and more sites are turning into commercial based sound clip previewer rather than free sound resources. Having to find the correct sound for your project but, later to find out the sound is copyrighted or for sale is indeed frustration at times.

Fortunately enough , this site – freesound.org offers royalty free and free for all sounds recordings from various content providers around the world. You can safely use some of these music, sound effect found there to use for your projects. Besides that, you can create an account and contribute too.

Go ahead check it out here.

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