I’m just getting back into the swing of things with Interface Builder after a little bit of a gap, and one of the first things I’ve noticed is that somewhere between the 2.2.1 and the most current 3.0 SDK’s, Apple have added a new special colour to the iPhone SDK, called “groupTableViewBackgroundColour”.
Previously it seemed you could only get this when creating your own grouped table view, but they’ve eased things off now so you can use it in regular views too. Nice!
High on excitement from coming back from WWDC, and following the advice given from All About iPhone, I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G S on pay-as-you-go for work.
As is necessary on the day of release of a new handset, here’s the obligatory sample video and photo from the device:
(Or watch the same thing on Vimeo, which may or may not look a little bit better.)
The photo test is of some lavender in the garden. There’s clearly some actual depth-of-field going on, and I was able to touch to move the focus to the foreground flower head, just like the demo at the WWDC keynote:
If you’re designing the user experience of an Android application for the first time – especially if you’re porting an existing J2ME application, a quick way to get up and going with designing the UI for the menu of the application is re-use some of the system icons that are shown by the pre-installed applications.
If you install the Android SDK and extract the contents of the android.jar file (it’s just a regular .zip archive under a different name) you’ll find a whole selection of images in the /res/drawables folder; the ones used on the menu items are all prefixed with ic_menu_.
Some examples below:
Most (if not all) of the icons you’ll find are freely accessible by developers and it makes good sense to stick to common imagery for tasks that the device users will be already familiar with.
Oh, if you didn’t already realise why I’m coming out with this now – you can now download the first beta for the lite version of Skype from the Android Market.
