In this article, Eva gives an overview of what embedded systems are and how they impact our lives. She presents three main learnings gained across her quest for creating better-embedded systems to enable the world as we know it.
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Before we can talk about how people interact, much less how to take advantage of that knowledge and design, it’s important to understand a bit about the history, the technology, and what today counts as a mobile touchscreen device at all.
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Every developer knows that just because a website looks like and does what it’s meant to on the latest iPhone, doesn’t mean it will work across every mobile device. In this article, we’ll highlight some of the many open device labs out there — fantastic and helpful initiatives by the community that deserve support and attention.
Open device labs (ODLs) are a response to the myriad of operating systems, browsers and devices that litter our technical landscape. They offer developers a (usually) free space to go to test their web systems, websites and apps on a range of software and hardware. This premise forms the core of the OpenDeviceLab.com initiative, which is a community movement to help people locate the right ODL for the job and to drum up further support for these testing centers.
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“We’re all back at square one again.” That was the overwhelming lesson we learned while designing our first major Apple Watch app for launch. To be successful in designing for this device, the entire way we think about app design will need an overhaul.
The patterns and processes that became standard for other devices are of little help here and, in many cases, can actively hinder efforts to create a beautiful, functional and user-centric watch experience.
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If a user of your product is buying a smartwatch tomorrow and your app is not compatible with it or your notifications can’t be triggered from there, you might frustrate them. If you have a website or an app today, it’s time to start planning support for wearable devices. In this article, we’ll review the platforms available today, what we can do on each of them, how to plan the architecture, and how to develop apps or companion services for these new devices.
Do you remember the shoe phone from Get Smart? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are probably too young (or I’m too old). (You can Google it now. Just go; I’ll wait here in this tab.) The shoe phone we saw on TV was followed by many other wearable devices on TV, such as the ones on Knight Rider, The Flintstones, James Bond and Dick Tracy. Many years later, we can say that wearable devices are here and ready to use. We, as designers and developers, need to be ready to develop successful experiences for them.
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There is no winner in the battle between iOS and Android, and we all know that. If a product succeeds on one platform, it will undoubtedly be ported to the other. Sometimes app developers don’t even bother waiting, and release apps for both platforms simultaneously. For designers this means only one thing — they will have to adapt an application’s UI and UX to another platform while ensuring a consistent design language across the product.
There are three different scenarios for UI multiplatform adaptation: retaining brand consistency; aligning with the conventions specific to the platform; and seeking a balance between the two. We decided to analyze these three approaches by looking at the most popular apps out there so that you get some insight into what method might work best for you.
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One sunny morning in the summer of 2014, I was sitting in a café having just finished an hour-long call with my remote team. Scheduling that call had been a messy exercise: we live in different time zones and it was hard to find a time that worked for everyone. I wanted to make dealing with time zone differences less painful.
I had some free time on my hands, so I pulled my notebook out and started playing around with an iWatch app idea. Yeah, you read that right — 2014 and iWatch, before a watch had ever been announced.
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How do you write a useful app for the Apple Watch? In what ways does it differ from coding for iOS? And what if you don’t have a Watch on hand to test with? Before the launch of the Apple Watch, our iOS team at myMail (one of the popular alternative email apps for iOS) worked tirelessly with a simulator to create a new Apple Watch app.
We wanted the first buyers of the Apple Watch to have the opportunity to use myMail from day one. What we learned through using the simulator and creating the app — including the Apple Watch’s UI quirks, passing data between devices, and the rigors of simulator-only development — is described below and (we hope) will help iOS developers get to results, faster, and avoid a few headaches down the road.
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Although Windows Phone usage is still low compared with other browsers it’s sometimes necessary to test your web work for Internet Explorer Mobile. For web developers, this could be a complication. Testing for the Windows Phone environment is not always optional, but it can be a chore — especially because the version of Internet Explorer that comes with the Windows Phone can be quirky at best. If you’re a developer without a Windows Phone device, you might have to get a little creative to ensure that your websites are being rendered properly.
In this article I want to point out a few different tools and techniques which can help test websites for Windows Phone even if you don’t have the real device handy or if you are not developing on Windows. But first let’s quickly look into the differences between mobile and desktop Internet Explorer.
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Responding to user input is arguably the core of what we do as interface developers. In order to build responsive web products, understanding how touch, mouse, pointer and keyboard actions and the browser work together is key. You have likely experienced the 300-millisecond delay in mobile browsers or wrestled with touchmove versus scrolling.
In this article we will introduce the event cascade and use this knowledge to implement a demo of a tap event that supports the many input methods while not breaking in proxy browsers such as Opera Mini.
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