I. Setting To begin with, the application we intended to port as a first get-in-touch with Windows RT (also referred to as Windows Runtime, WinRT) is a small, Windows Phone 7 based soccer game leveraging the mightiness of Silverlight as a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Therefore, the game´s entire frontend had been […]

In one of our previous blog articles we talked about the use of pie menus in touch screen interfaces and discussed pros and cons of this kind of interaction. In this article, we are going to show a concrete example of how a pie menu can be used.

Every user interface designer is familiar with the procedure to some extent: To find out what a user interface needs to look and behave like it’s certainly a good idea to create a prototype and evaluate it with potential users. Users will tell you what’s still nagging them and therefore should be improved before coding […]

Centigrade specializes in creating GUIs, in many projects with a particular focus on the implementation of Java Swing based GUIs for desktop applications. With the advancement of the mobile market, it is an obvious step for Centigrade to also have a look at Java based mobile GUIs. This article gives an overview on the mobile […]

In the previous part I took a closer look at how and to what extent Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder offer pixel-graphics and vector-graphics tools to enable GUI designers to create modern user interfaces. In addition I outlined the concept of 9-Slice-Scaling, a method to make pixel graphics scalable without any quality loss. […]

The previous part of this series outlined why it is not possible to just create one single vector-based instance of an icon to scale it to any desired size. This part raises the question, on the one hand, what tool support would need to exist in the future in order to serve an icon designer’s […]

In the first part of this series I described how user interface design tools bring together developers and designers in a seamless workflow and gave an overview of the technical environments of Adobe’s and Microsoft’s tools in that area. In this article, I am going to focus on the use of pixel and vector graphics […]