Web designers who use mobile apps and design sites are quickly gaining an edge over their non-mobile-using competition. With the population constantly connected to their devices, it is no wonder more and more designers are using mobile apps—and you should too.
Apple took time to update investors on the status of its ecosystem on today’s call, revealing that it has crossed the 45 billion total app download mark, just over four months after it crossed the 40 billion download mark back in January. Apps are being downloaded at a rate of 800 per second, from a total pool of 850,000 iOS apps in total, with 350,000 apps designed for iPad alone.
That 350,000 is the same as the number of total iOS apps reported by Apple as of January 2011, just a year after the launch of the iPad. At the time, Apple had only 60,000 iPad apps, which means iPad-specific titles have seen a 483 percent increase in the intervening years...
I always believe that a good and functional design is the one which takes into consideration even the minor aspects. Sure, the icon is not a minor detail but unfortunately many of the software developers thinks that because why should you spend your time designing a small icon which if only clicked once in the app running cycle?
Well, an icon acts like a business card: if it’s great, the user will love it and his first impression will be accordingly. Having a nice icon means that you really care about your application and you have invested into quality, so I strongly recommend you to not ignore this little detail. Even more, if you are planning to create an app for iOS, you should know that Apple users are extremely picky when it comes to quality, so it’s very hard to impress them. Below you can see a collection of 30 very detailed examples of iOS icons which are attracting user’s attention.
Yahoo! acquired startup Summly for somewhere around $30 million just one month ago, but it’s already bearing fruit. First, there was the Summly summarized version of its Q1 2013 earnings last week, and now there’s a brand new flagship Yahoo! iOS application out today (for U.S. users only for now) with Summly summaries built right in.
The Summly acquisition attracted a lot of attention, in part because it was helmed by 17-year old Nick D’Aloisio, and because part of its technology was based on a licensing arrangement with SRI, the same company that originally spawned Siri, Apple’s virtual voice-powered assistant software. It’s been speculated that gaining access to that license in part motivated the acquisition.
If you want to give your kid every opportunity to succeed, it’s hard to argue with teaching them to code. Some of the wealthiest and most influential people of our time began programming young, and who wouldn’t want that kind of future for our kids?
Yesterday, we reviewed Hopscotch, an iPad app that teaches children the basics of any modern programming language. However, that’s just one of the many options out there. Here are six free tools to get kids excited about code. Whether she’s 5 or 15, and whether she wants to learn Ruby or Java, there’s something here just for her...
Flat design is becoming increasingly popular in the design and development space. When we say “flat” we are referring to the minimalist approach to design. We remove borders, shadows, variants, 3d elements to come up with a very clean simple and yes flat design. Minimal design has been popular for a while and it seems that the flat concept is taking the minimalist approach to next level. In this post we have put together some beautiful iPhone applications with flat design. If you like these designs you might also want to check out our previous post below.
Today LinkedIn is releasing an overhauled iPhone and Android app, as well as a matching mobile website, all with a cleaner, sleeker layout that makes it much easier to navigate. The company's old design featured a sequence of nonstop gray blocks that were packed with information, but now LinkedIn is replacing those with big and bright tiles that give more room to each of the stories in the news stream, similar to the iPad app that it released last year. Larger photos and text fill up every story, and each update is separated by a simple break between the tiles. The new app also replaces the previous version's icon-based navigation menu with a left-hand sliding pane, which includes personalized shortcuts and generally lets users move around the app more quickly.
If you hate targeted ads, the Internet can be a very frustrating place. Online juggernauts like Twitter, Facebook, and Google keep developing partnerships with third-party sites that track your every mouse hover, all while developing native tracking programs. The goal: targeting you for ads with scary accuracy, and even if the objective is peddling wares and not peeping at your personal life, it’s at least invasive and at most a gross abuse of power. And the companies keep introducing new ways to bombard you, like how Facebook is testing targeted ads in its Graph Search and tightening its partnerships with third-party trackers.
I was having a chat with a friend of mine recently and somehow we got onto the subject of hidden messages in Apple icons. Admittedly it’s not something I’d thought too much about prior to this conversation and the only example I could recall was the “Here’s to the crazy ones…” quote on the TextEdit icon. However, a quick search online revealed that there is in fact quite a few.
Google has updated its YouTube iOS app to version 1.3, with the most notable improvement being support for live streaming.
Oddly enough, the update comes right after Coachella, which was streamed to YouTube this weekend. There's always next year, we guess.
To find some truly inspiring iPhone app interfaces you have to move away from all the commercially popular titles in the app store and instead take a look at some of the UI concepts designers are creating either for small projects or just for fun. This post showcases 40 beautiful iPhone app interface concepts, all of which are cleanly designed and offer some great creative inspiration for your own projects.
Last week we showcased here 21 Beautiful iPhone App Websites and I received several requests for a list showing examples of Android app websites. Last week I even added a note at the end of the article asking for suggestions of well designed Android related websites because I imagined our readers would be interested in seeing some websites designed for Android apps. Unfortunately I didn’t receive many suggestions, but I searched around and found a few really nice examples to show you. Some websites are dedicated only to Android apps, other are for both Android and iPhone, and I added those so we could have more examples.
Facebook Home was released this weekend for a select few Android devices, and reviews have been decidedly negative. The app is designed to replace the default home screen on Android devices with a Facebook home screen. This is meant to make using Facebook not only easier, but smoother and more immersive.
Mobile magazine Flipboard revealed today that over half a million personalized magazines have been created on its platform since the launch of the new feature just two weeks prior. During this time, the company also added 3 million new users to its service, bringing its total user base to now 53 million.
In late March, the startup introduced a way for its users to something else besides search, discover, read and share to social networks – it essentially turned its entire audience into magazine editors. With a “flip it” option now accompanying every story from Flipboard’s collection of content from publishers around the world, anyone is able to now create personalized, topical magazines which other readers can subscribe to directly in the iOS or Android application...
Twitter acquired the music discovery service We Are Hunted last year and is using its technology to build a standalone music app, CNET has learned.
The app, to be called Twitter Music, could be released on iOS by the end of this month, according to a person familiar with the matter. Twitter Music suggests artists and songs to listen to based on a variety of signals, and is personalized based on which accounts a user follows on Twitter. Songs are streamed to the app via SoundCloud.
Twitter Music, which is set to arrive in the wake of key competitor Facebook overhauling the music section of its News Feed, shows Twitter taking new steps into becoming a full-fledged media company. The app acknowledges the key role music has played in drawing new users to the service -- particularly younger, mainstream users. Pop stars have some of Twitter's most popular accounts, with followings in the tens of millions. The TwitterMusic account has 2.3 million followers -- not a bad perch from which to launch an eponymous app...
Mobile Design is an area of design that started to develop and evolve a couple of years ago. With the launch of the iPhone and the App Store in 2008, the development of mobile applications started to become a more interesting market, since there was finally good mobile hardware and ecosystem. With the development of more and more mobile apps, the design of such apps started to become increasingly more important, to create a good experience to the user, while creating powerful applications.
Nowadays the design and development of mobile applications is a reality, and you already know that. But if you haven’t yet hopped on the mobile design wagon, in this article you’ll be able to find what are the most important things you have to do to start designing mobile apps right away.
Do you like video games? More to the point, do you like developing games and making money? Then here's some great news: The gaming boom that's been underway for the past few years is still picking up steam.
And the good times should keep rolling for years— at least, that is, through 2018 or so. But by that point you'll have had plenty of time to establish yourself, or even to have made your pile and retired.
There is no doubt the popularity of Apple’s iOS App Store. There are more developers joining and publishing their apps on every day. And the process is moving so quickly that smaller apps with amazing features can get pushed underneath the rug.
Today’s I want to dedicate to share an another amazing collection of iPhone and iPad app icons. This time we’re gathered creative iOS App Icon designs for inspiration. Dribbble members have often been designing these formatted icons for inspiring developers to build upon. And even aside from the app ideas you can brainstorm some fantastic icons by working off such a talented collection.
Here is a big list of 60 Beautiful iOS App Icon Design for your Inspiration. These mobile app icons are the best examples of UI design. UI design involves a lot of creativity, inspiration and motivation along with the people-skills necessary to communicate effectively with clients.
Nothing gets a web designer more excited than a visually stunning User Interface, especially on a mobile device. With mobile use constantly on the rise, it’s important for designers to capture the users eye and keep them intrigue. These 30 beautiful mobile UI examples below do just that…
The retina screens of the newer iPhone and iPad models have led to crisper, clearer and brighter screens filled with more details than before. One of the unexpected benefits of this is that app icons can also reveal more details. While some icons look great with a minimalist feel – incredibly detailed app icons now have more of a chance to shine.
Including intricate detailing within the app icon design can help to add a certain level of realism. Sometimes the designs are unexpected and help the app to stand out against it’s competitors – or at least make the app more memorable.
