Is there any one who would like to share their opinions on what graphic designing programs they would consider?
I've started in graphic designing not long ago, but seeing how I want to pick it back up again, I was hoping if anyone could suggest any programs (Free or not) that they think is well suited. In particular, the program could be beginnner, moderate, or advanced.
So... Feel free to drop an opinion on what programs you would prefer and why?
**I'm looking for programs that could specifically help me make like for example, Splash screens, icons, and etc.
Thank you for taking your time for reading this!
(One more thing, before anyone starts to chew me out, YES, I did look through wiki, I searched forums, AND I also tried searching through xda-devleopers using Google; some topics are distantly related, but not to the point i'm trying to get.)
photoshop and illustrator are all i use.
If you are looking for freeware/oss... then gimp2 and inkscape
Same as the post above, Photoshop and illustrator. Sometimes I also use XSI Softimage to model something which I use in my designs. My main tool is photoshop though.
:edit: Forgot another important one, pencil and paper!
Photoshop or GIMP and a graphic tablet
And and if you want to do some work on your ppc as well, there's pocket artist, which basically feels like a ppc version of photoshop (of course as powerful as photoshop, but still offers lot of functionality).
Once again, I really appreciate your opinions that you have given me so far and it really HELPED!
Thank you so much, but keep them coming.
Lastly, best of all to everyone!
Related
Is anyone working on porting this to other devices ? I found a thread in the general-general section without feedback so i think its not well known what Asus brought out with his p320 device, but it runnes on a slow 200 Mhz cpu with QVGA with smooth animations and fadings so this or Parts of it could be interesting for us and not to hard to crack (hope so) for other devices:
here you see today plugin with great animations and a kind of cube with multi homescreens (watch full videos ist getting better and better):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD71bGRgEsc
- musicplayer (!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r-q407su9M
- pictureviewer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YC-dQNXSg0
- icatchyou for googlemaps: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTQUlnYv2i0
would be nice, it´s a completely new concept (at least for me) and Asus really had some nice ideas. Eg the player, selecting single songs out of one album and then start to play - don´t know any other app / player that has got this feature.
Eh, you´re telling me there are playlists...I know, but this isn´t as convenient.
So, let´s get a dump, I´d say
regards,
Martin
yeah that's a very nice today screen and i also love the music player! shouldn't be too hard to port i guess
That would be great cause I have a phone that looks like that ASUS!
I really hope someone can port this too..but I rather not get my hopes up, no one has been able to port the Asus Lambo today plugin yet..only managed to skin it
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=386041&highlight=lambo
yes they do a good job, but everyone here is just working on manila and mobile shell, boaring
well, those two are very nice graphically done interfaces that people like and both are highly customizable. But I've quit both..because it makes me reset me phone like twice a day due to memory loss
can anyone here with ASUS phone dump it??????
Hi there! I have Asus P320, but there is no Glide GUI in this phone. Only the today plugin is the same. My firmware is 4.10 and the latest is 4.13. There is no word about Glide in the change log.
mmhh, so u just have the today plugin and none of the applications from first Post ? i read some articles from May 2008 about glide and that it is part of the P320
Looks pretty sweet! Please genius programmers/hax0rs port this out for us!
It looks darn good! However, I think that the p320 only has the 2d stuff (like the opal and the m2d) on asus' homepage one can see that the p552w has the glide stuff and it has a whole lot stronger cpu than the p320 624MHz vs 200MHz. Just my two cents.
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=11&l2=55
That's right.
Someone buy the phone already and put us out of our misery, by being a dumpster Hehe
one thing i was impressed with is the icatchu it has some pretty nice features if that could get dumped out that would be nice
Truely Amazing that those run so smooth on a 200mhz CPU... god that things battery life would be rather extensive making it an excellent mp3 player for general users and since its so finger friendly it could be for anyone really.
I hv the ROM dump..I will try to post the files from it...still not sure which dlls are also reponsible.All this is kept very secret even if one dumps the ROM
do you colect PDA´s??
Glide rom...
Was the dumped rom posted?
nice interface
i hope we can find a cab install for us
Ive been thinking about TF3D and its negatives and positives about and want to see what you think and have to say
The "people" list, aka the tf3d contact list just plain sucks IMO, too damn big font for my taste, totaly nullifies the use of a big screen and I cant find the function to sort after company or use as the regular contact list can which makes it totally usable for me :/
The SMS function that is combined with the user is good in someways but I hardly ever use it, also way too big, is it just me that have good eyesight or is everything with TF3D just damn big? IMO we have a big screen to see lots of stuff, not just make them bigger and prettier... >_<
The built in music player in tf3d is pretty.. but PocketPlayer just pwnz it totally IMO, so much better features and possibilites with PP, one of the first apps I bought when I got my Touch HD
That are the negatives I come to think of now, I know there are more... but TF3D becomes better and better so maybe some of it will not be negative for me
Positive stuff is ofcourse that its pretty, smooth easy to use interface, beats most other standard WM GUIs, atleast all I have tried
There are no GUIs for WM that is more like Android? I dont know much about Android phones but what from I have seen it really seems more customizable and you can move to different desktops with different wallpapers and different functions and apps?
Hey this is my first post here. I've been using a nexus one for a while now and I downloaded quite a few applications. I have to say thought that I was quite disappointed by the graphical diversity that lingers around the android platform. As a vfx artist I like my phone to work but also to look nice and sometimes the two things are not present in android.
So I was wondering if someone is interested in writing down some guidelines to better UI designs and maybe provide developers with some graphical help. My idea was not to copy the iphone ui or the new windows mobile 7 but to take what Google has done and expand it to provide cleaner and more interesting UIs to apps.
What do you guys think, is anyone on board for this?
Sadly, I think that this is probably the largest problem on Android devices. The huge inconsistency of the UI throughout makes Android devices hard to use when compared to, say, an iPhone. For example, the stock GMail app has a white background against black text, but the stock Email app has a black against white background. Both apps have essentially the same functions but the way to perform those functions and manage their settings are completely different.
androidlicious said:
Sadly, I think that this is probably the largest problem on Android devices. The huge inconsistency of the UI throughout makes Android devices hard to use when compared to, say, an iPhone. For example, the stock GMail app has a white background against black text, but the stock Email app has a black against white background. Both apps have essentially the same functions but the way to perform those functions and manage their settings are completely different.
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So they look the same, or did you twist your words?
atoz350 said:
So they look the same, or did you twist your words?
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Well, I was trying to come up with a good example but I guess that it didn't come across as such. I guess another example is the camera application. I mean, its UI and design looks completely different from all the other applications...
I don't mind applications to have totally different designs as long as they are intuitive and make sense in the context of the application and I think a lot of them don't.
It's true though that some more general guidelines like the one they have for the iphone would help some developers to not only keep consistency but also keep the design relevant to the tasks provided by the app.
What do you guys prefer? I think android strenght could be a custom design for each app as long as it's intuitive, a perfectly good example is the gallery application introduced in 2.1
Here are some ideas:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/470566/android-user-interface-guidelines
There is a link there to a good pdf (the link in the question over stackoverflow is dead): https://island.byu.edu/files/AndroidHIG.pdf
Though, it isn't complete but it could be a good base.
janfsd said:
Here are some ideas:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/470566/android-user-interface-guidelines
There is a link there to a good pdf (the link in the question over stackoverflow is dead): https://island.byu.edu/files/AndroidHIG.pdf
Though, it isn't complete but it could be a good base.
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This is great especially the pdf and the gnome guidelines!
Don't forget the Android UI Guidelines.
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html
This is probably a bit of a stupid question with probably a very obvious answer. But why are all the apps for windows mobile all ugly?
We have HTC sense and that looks great why can't other apps keep the htc sense feel like from menus or anything instead of reverting to windows mobile style.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some people for example even love ginger children.
Many WinMo apps have been written to look the way they are so that they fitted in with a standard WinMo look and feel. Others were simply designed by talentless and tasteless folk (like Steve Jobs).
Believe it or not the apps have actually got better looking recently.
ETA: If you go to the link in my sig and check my recommended apps, you'll see that a lot of apps do look nice. Slacker, Bing, etc.
I think it should be compulsory to use the Sense SDK Look 'n' Feel now for every app developed for Windows Mobile
Partly because developers != designers.
At the same time, HTC Sense is but a few years old, while Windows Mobile and its associated 'ugly' interface have been around for 10. It's a bit unreasonable to expect all the applications to reflect the updated design of a single manufacturer.
madindehead said:
I think it should be compulsory to use the Sense SDK Look 'n' Feel now for every app developed for Windows Mobile
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Thats bordering on fascism! Do you work for apple?
So it is actually possible to have a good looking app?
aLlamaWithARifle said:
This is probably a bit of a stupid question with probably a very obvious answer. But why are all the apps for windows mobile all ugly?
We have HTC sense and that looks great why can't other apps keep the htc sense feel like from menus or anything instead of reverting to windows mobile style.
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It's because WM doesn't have a unified screen size, like the iPhone for example. So the apps/games have to be made in VGA, QVGA, WVGA to name three of many many others. So the games have to be made for each naitive screen size to actually look 'pretty', and the poorer looking apps on the HD2 are made for a screen size that isn't WVGA.
Speaking of ugly apps, is there a starter's guide or someplace to look for skinning stock applications (in particular, I'm interested in Outlook, as email's one of my top use cases, and the default skin looks awful)? I can code, but am at a loss as to where to even start. I did a search on the forums to no avail. To clarify, I'm not simply looking for skins, but am interested in creating my own for specific applications. Any pointers?
Most of the newer apps (< 1-2 years) do look good, and on every screen size, take G-Alarm, Resco Photo Manager, Opera 10, etc...
Most other blunt-looking apps are several years old, and date back from when visual design didn't have any consideration from developers, they were just using the default looks and controls rather than spending as much time and effort redesigning their own UI as needed to actually develop the application's functionality. Pocket Outlook is just the same as it was 5 years ago or even more...
But now pretty much everybody agrees that custom graphics is worth it...
This really is quite a naive question... if it was all about simple, smooth looking apps we would have bought an iPhone...
Having said that, what particular programs are you looking for? Most functions of a WinMo phone can now be utilised using programs with amazing UIs.
Browser: Opera Mobile 10/Mini 5
Email: You have sense... and even when you open an individual email (where it defaults to Outlook) we have pinch-to-zoom brilliance
SMS: You have sense...
Contacts/Phone: You have sense...
Photos/Videos: HTC, or try Resco Photo Manager
File explorer: Standard one is actually fine imo, but there's also the skinnable Resco, Total Commander, Throttle Explorer
Others: Google maps, Facebook, iGO8
There's a plethora of options out there.
Basically i want to temporally distance myself from my current apps and focus on something new and worth doing but i just can't think of something new and unique to create.
I also wouldn't mind either joining an open source project or just creating one but even then i wouldn't know what I'd like to do.
So i was just wondering if any of you fellow members and devs can think of any apps that you've either always wanted or just something you'd use everyday.
If you comment then bare in mind that despite developing pretty much everyday since, i have only been developing since around September last year....
So yeah any suggestions would be great as I'm pretty much out of idea's.
AmatuerAppDeveloper said:
Basically i want to temporally distance myself from my current apps and focus on something new and worth doing but i just can't think of something new and unique to create.
I also wouldn't mind either joining an open source project or just creating one but even then i wouldn't know what I'd like to do.
So i was just wondering if any of you fellow members and devs can think of any apps that you've either always wanted or just something you'd use everyday.
If you comment then bare in mind that despite developing pretty much everyday since, i have only been developing since around September last year....
So yeah any suggestions would be great as I'm pretty much out of idea's.
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Go for a walk in the park or forest on a nice day and you'll get some ideas I have a list of a about ten apps or libraries I could start doing when I someday will have some time...
But if you're going open source, I don't mind to share some ideas:
What could be fun (but not extremely useful) would be an app centered around orientation, which allowed you to set orientation per app. Or just turning off lockscreen auto-rotate on lower end devices can speed things up a lot.
One thing I'm eager to find out if its possible (but will probably never get time to do it) is an app which forces a live wallpaper to be scrollable. Not a launcher, but maybe a live wallpaper itself which acts as a llayer above and loader for the real live wallpaper. It would just have to fool the display size in some way and then move the surface around on touches. Don't know if that is realistic or in any way fast.
One more exceptional idea, how about an app which monitors the currently running services an allows you to set notifications when a particular app starts a service (Facebook, etc) to see if a service consumes too much battery or runs unnecessarily.
Last but certainly not least, I would love to see an open source library which mirrors the Google Keep (now its called Notes isn't it?) like reminder time picker. I don't mean the standard time picker, but the two spinners to add a reminder tomorrow afternoon or next Monday for instance. I was thinking about doing that myself and already have an app idea using it, but probably won't have time for it.
Hope that helped and at least got you some aspects and directions to look into