Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Advance material Design Color Palette II

This an android color resource file denoting a full advanced color palette for material design. Both Monochromatic(Minimal design) and Google vibrant are supported.


The bottom black and whites is for Monochomatic with the top half serving as the palette for the action color. Obviously, the top-half is the Google-inspired vibrant color palette.

It has substantially more colors than one shown as an example in the Google material Design Guide. This is the first major tweaking of colors.

The gpl gimp file for it has not been created yet. If you do create one send me the gist link to my email listed on my github pages:


So that I can properly point to your created gpl files in my gist.

As far as a gimp formatted UI-UX kit, its being created at the moment by choosing the best UI kit and completing the gimp conversions(ie converting to xcf and keeping the embedded rgb profiles). Should be sometime in December when I post the full UI kit including the gpl gimp files.


Remember folks, Google in its Material Design Guide directly states their Hues-And-Accent color matching and monochromatic matching. BUT, they also imply indirectly the other two possible color matching styles as forms of branding. One is choosing the color matching that fits the branding needs of the android app you are designing.

Not every branding case will match up with Google Vibrant or Monochromatic or the other color matching styles. Its your job as the android app designer to determine which color matching style best servers your client's branding needs.

Monday, November 21, 2016

Silicon ValleyWakeUP Call

Trump getting elected sent a very loud call to Silicon Valley to wake up to the effects of both tech disruption through job loss and income equality. And yet if you look at the Democratic message lately they still have not got the message.

Look SV VCs, if you do not solve job loss through tech disruption and income equality dumb voters will solve it for by voting you out..what part of that message is not clear to you?

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Does Minimal Design fit in Google Material Design?

Yes, in-fact it does as if you read the color area of Google Material Design it states you can use monochromatic color schemes. Than the accent color becomes the action color for user actions.

Your flash of brand color comes at the beginning in the app intro onboarding.

You will find that app users appreciate the negative space focus on content and app features.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Counter to Minimalism

Rise of Minimalism

The article highlights a point that with brands adopting minimalism a competing app gets lost in that one cannot differentiate between the two apps.

The answer may be slight slivers of color and other adornments that do not take up much space but are just enough to differentiate.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

CheatSheets-Android

Sort of pivoting the android dev books in that seeing if doing cheatsheets first on subjects like activities, fragments, etc  helps me better tease the book while helping me see the over-all picture that I have to write about in the chapters of the dev books.

Naming of the cheatsheets is up for grabs..it wil be SomeNameCribs probably.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Lead A/B

So since A/B testing is so good on app onboarding and other UX issues its about time I test in my lead gathering. So the next few days testing some LinkedIN invite texts to see which has the greatest impact among VC and Angel investors.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

UX-Progress

I am on the final parts of the first release of the BlueButterfly UX library set. That specifically means that some new UX elements and app demo videos coming  out and some medium articles.

As the videos are produced gif them and finish overhauling  my gh-apges site.

The challenge is where are the UX mobile app gig leads. I know where they are not and that is all the freelance platforms online. So the idea is to push out marketing blurbs via linkedin invites of interesting VCs, reddit forhire posts, HN posts,medium articles, a linkedin article or two, etc.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

UX-Lib-Organizing

Now, I am the stage of re-organizing the UX-libs. The reasoning is that the ones integrated with back-porting I only have to use for the next 36-months. Thus, I want to be able to quickly refactor them to not have the Carbon integration but instead us AppCompat.

The good news is found a new plugin FreeLine which does speed up gradle builds so that means I can go with having the UxLib package have 25+ modules without major time wasting during builds. It also means I have less of need to track how much methods I am using ie the 65k method limit.

I am ending up having a core Uxlib composed of Carbon, Materialize, and MaterialValues and my added full real color material design palette. Than every other UX lib is inits own module.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Programmer Meal App

So I have always wondered about lifestyle apps, those apps someone creates that pay that person's lifestyle with somewhat minimal upkeep of the app.  I think I will try a cooking app.

What I mean by cooking app is that the recipes are in database form so that the app can calculate and generate a grocery list when you tell it your weekly meal plan based on the recipes in the app. Not a billion or million downloads but it should be nough downloads and in-app purchases to help pay for something.

Programmers are somewhat bad at cooking and that bad technique than bleeds into poor diet habits and other unhealthy stuff. If the meal app covvered just some basics in cooking with some flexible meal recipes that might just be the right thing to put out there.

And I have to do this creatively as I do need UX app demos out there for my own marketing purposes. So I can do a Programmers unhealthy Meal App first somewhat as a joke and not worry that someone is copying it, thus it protects my real app and real trademark with that app as than its hidden by obfuscation as its not that unhealthy meal app.

I still need an app name, even if its a UX demo...

GeekSnacky


The challenge part is the portion conversions of the ingredients so that I can have the app compute the grocery list based off of the users defined weekly meal plan.


Monday, November 7, 2016

Elevate-Ripple, etc

Drawables and Layouts can only go so far as far as back-porting. Evidently, to get full dynamic changing elevation like on the raised buttons I will have to use Carbon and than port the other cleaned up UX libs to Carbon. Oh what fun..

Saturday, November 5, 2016

WebSite-Revamp

In my quest to define myself as designer-developer I think I should bring the Google Material Design message further to the front in my website. Here is what it looks like now:

MySite

Not bad, but I think I should have my UX App demos on the first page in the form of say one or two best ones.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

UX Challenges; Photo Albums

Guess what one of the biggest UX challenges on mobile is?  Getting a designer or developer to realize that on mobile that a photo album cannot be implemented the same way as one does it on web for desktops.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Adoptable Storage-Your Apps on SDCard

Those buying new Android Devices should know that some OEMs limit Adoptable Storage..Moto and HTc do not..Samsung and LG do..The reddit thread explaining things is here.


Tuesday, November 1, 2016

My UX Lib Palette

I somewhat promised a list of my UX lib palette. Remember, I am targeting android 4.1-4.4 along with Android 5-7. Most of the things I had to clean up are wrong stuff on UI threads, font asset folder leakage, forgetting if Build.SDk.INT bracketing new API calls,etc. No github links as I do not have time and you have Google:

ActionBarProgress

Aligned

MaterialAnimatedSwitch

MaterialCAB

CardsLib

ChipView

CicularReveal

DialogPlus

GoogleNaviagtionDrawerMenu

Android Iconics

MaterialIntroScreen

Materialize

MateriaLeanBack

MultiStateAnimation

ProgressButton

MaterialRangeBAr

RevealFAB

RevealLayout

ZDepthShadowLayout

Material ScrollBar

Material Scrolling

Material SearchView

MaterialSettings

ShadowLayout

ShapeRipple

SlideButton

SmooothProgressbar

SwitchButton

TapTargetView

MaterialTextField

ToolTips

MaterialValues

VerticalStepperForm

ViewAnimator

ViewCustomBackground

ViewRevealAnimator

WaveProgressBar

Blaze

ViewDecorator

Of course after 36 months that list will decrease by half as than I will be targeting android 5-to-android-10.

Note, for preference compatibility instead of the androidsupportpreference compatibility library I choose a simpler simplistic solution named MaterialSettings that does not require as much api methods. That is either wrong or right depending upon your project requirements as mine are different from yours and I am making use Google Guava os I need some room to decrease the api method counts.



And that list will allow you to gurantee full 99% of Material Design with all the new UI features back-ported across all android OS versions you are targeting.