Aesthetics
After you meet your interface’s basic needs, it’s time to focus on your interface’s higher needs. Aesthetics is the first higher need. To meet this need, your interface needs a unique, friendly and professional look that sets it apart from the crowd. Good aesthetics is what will make users remember your interface. It can even help you create a loyal following among your users. By examining the aesthetics, users should get a sense of your interface’s values and personality.
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Are You Meeting the User Experience Hierarchy of Needs?
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Which came first: the design chicken, or the code egg?
Trust me on this one: there are few worse feelings as a hybrid than to have presented a design to a client, then realize you’re out of your depth when it comes to coding the damn thing. To avoid this woozy, guts-twisted feeling, we do the smart thing & play it safe – we design things that we know how to code.
Android Still Most Popular Smartphone OS, iOS Holds Steady In Second Place
(via Techcrunch)
According to new data from Nielsen, Android has continued to pick up steam in the United States, and retains its crown as the most-used smartphone OS during Q3 2011. Google’s mobile OS now accounts for 43% of U.S. smartphones, up from the 39% we saw back in July. Apple’s iOS, on the other hand, has remained lock-steady at 28% this whole time, putting it at a distant second.
Despite their lack of growth on the software front, Apple still rules the roost when it comes to hardware. Apple’s iPhones are used by a full 28% of all smartphone customers, making them the top manufacturer for yet another quarter.
Meanwhile, use of RIM’s BlackBerry OS has slowly begun to slip: while it previously accounted for 20% of the smartphone OS market, it now accounts for 18%. Certainly not a drastic dip, but the Q3 report doesn’t take into account some of the more recent unpleasantness that the folks in Waterloo have been dealing with.
Surprisingly, Windows Phone’s adoption rate seems to have slowed down as well, as it now only accounts for 7% of smartphones, down from the 9% figure we saw last time. Microsoft and Nokia certainly aim to change that come next year, but we’ll soon see how well their grand designs pan out.
The Q3 results are definitely interesting, but I think the Q4 report is really the one to look out for. New hardware (and OS) announcements are coming at a blistering pace, and it’ll be a hoot to see how the landscape changes after the holiday retail wars have come and gone.
Admitting that may be career suicide, or possibly it will cost me dearly because ‘software engineers’ are raking in the big bucks these days, but the fact of the matter is that I’m a programmer. It’s what I do best and it is the job title that I associate with most because it feels as though the biggest chunk of me will always be most likely to blurt that out when people ask me what my job is. That I like to program definitely helps.
Increased use of smartphones, tablets fuels demand for developers
The mobile app economy is real — and it’s brewing in Baltimore.
Many businesses are opening their wallets and spending to build mobile apps for customers to use. And developers are in hot demand across the United States, various surveys this year show . It’s all a response to a young technology that has become a $6.8 billion market — and is growing quickly.
In the Baltimore area, the mobile app economy is still in its early stages, fueled by a small corps of independent developers, advertising and marketing companies, and a handful of companies that specialize in creating the apps.
But interest is high. Last November, Chris Stone, co-founder of a Harford County-based website development firm, started the Baltimore Mobile group to help build the community of app developers and designers. The group has gone from three to nearly 200 members, with meet-ups every three weeks in Canton.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” said Stone. “It’s grown way faster than anyone expected.”
Baltimore’s mobile ecosystem is anchored by Millennial Media, a private firm that goes toe-to-toe with Google and Apple in mobile advertising. It’s a promising startup that’s drawn $67 million in private investment since its founding five years ago. …
Apple is putting deep Twitter integration as well as a slightly artificially intelligent system called Assistant that also does speech recognition in the mix. The result is a perfect storm of technology that will bring fast, integrated face recognition tech to every hour of millions of iPhone users’ lives. Things will change.
