Simon Whatley » reference

User Interface Guidelines for Mobile and Tablet Devices

Simon — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:49:17 +0000

The official user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) guidelines from the manufacturers, links to which you can find below, are a source of inspiration for mobile web and application design. Here, you will find guidelines, samples, tips, and descriptions of common mistakes. Many of the guidelines focus on native application development, but we can apply most parts of them to mobile web design.

To provide the best possible experience on each platform, don’t deliver an iPhone experience to a BlackBerry or Android user. Every platform has its own UI and usability guidelines that every user is expecting from your application. For example, the popular Twitter application TweetDeck has a different user interface and therefore user experience between its iPhone and Android versions, albeit the TweetDeck team aims to provide a similar user experience on both devices. The same can be said between mobile an tablet devices with Reeder and Pulse prime examples on iOS devices.

Apple (iOS)

iOS Human Interface Guidelines or the PDF version (PDF 12.9MB, pp. 150)

BlackBerry

UI Guidelines for BlackBerry 6.0 Smartphones or the PDF version (PDF 9.2MB, pp. 109)
UI Guidelines for BlackBerry 4.x, 5.x Smartphones or the PDF version (PDF 7.4MB, pp. 89)
BlackBerry Browser Content Design Guidelines (PDF 356KB, pp. 29)

Google (Android)

Microsoft (Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7)

UI Guidelines for Windows Mobile
Windows Touch UI Guideline
UI Design & Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 version 2.0 (PDF 11.9MB, pp. 101)

Nokia (Symbian)

Nokia Design & User Experience Library
Symbian^3 UI Style Guidelines (PDF 4.5MB, pp. 105)
Forum Nokia Design Portal
Symbian UI Wiki
Nokia Series 40 UI Style Guide
Hildon UI Guidelines for Nokia Maemo

Palm/Hewlett Packard (webOS)

webOS UI Guidelines

Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson UI Rulebook

Others

If you know of any other examples of UI guidelines for mobile or tablet devices or have any general thoughts, please feel free to add them to the comments.

jQuery 1.2 API Reference

Simon — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:55:25 +0000

Among the plethora of JavaScript libraries to have been released, few have been recognised to be as effective as jQuery. This lightweight library has been the subject of different discussions since it was launched in 2006. Basically, jQuery has the ability to flawlessly string together JavaScript together with HTML. Because of its effectiveness, there have different types of lightweight applications and plug-ins launched using jQuery. Ajax based websites that offers simple interface would virtually work together using jQuery’s simple interface.

Download the jQuery 1.2 API Reference (360KB).

More information can be found on the jQuery Website.

ActionScript 3 RIA Reference Guide

Simon — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:46:21 +0000

The ActionScript reference for rich Internet application development provides an alphabetical reference for all native ActionScript APIs for the Adobe technology platform runtimes: Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIRâ€”as well as the Adobe Flex framework APIs. Use this guide both as an API reference and a tool to learn about the ActionScript APIs available within the runtimes.

Download the ActionScript reference for RIA development (PDF 1.3MB)

The Adobe technology platform contains two primary runtimes. Flash Player is browser-based, and Adobe AIR is desktop-based. Because Adobe AIR is built on top of Flash Player, the Flash Player APIs are available within Adobe AIR. Consequently, Adobe AIR APIs are not available within Flash Player. The Flex framework is built on top of the Flash Player APIs, so it runs in both Flash Player and Adobe AIR. However, a number of Flex APIs take advantage of AIR APIs, and thus work only within Adobe AIR.

More information about this guide can be found on the Adobe Developer Centre Website.