I'm developing a web site, but I don't know what the lowest 'supported' resolution should be. I know that it will function in all resolutions, but by 'supported' I mean that all the content will fit in the page without scrolling from side to side. Should I even think about 'supporting' 1024x768?
There isn't a correct answer here, other than "know your audience". That's not a very easy thing to do early on in development, unless you are targeting a very specific niche audience.
The common approach for a generic website would be to check current browser display statistics for popular sites:
W3 Counter
W3Schools Browser Display Statistics
1024x768 is still a very popular resolution, and a safe bet. And, although I haven't found any official stats, it's obviously the resolution Stack Exchange targets.
Not at the moment because I plan on making a mobile site later.
I'll focus on the desktop side of things in this answer.
According to Net Applications, 1024x768 is the most popular resolution used today with over 15%. The next step down in 'desktop' sizes is 800x600, but it only has a share of 0.89%, so you probably won't have to bother supporting resolutions below 1024x768 on your desktop site.
A safe width for content on desktop browsers is 960px, which leaves just enough room for a simple background on the very common 1024x768 displays mentioned in other answers. A 960px width is also friendly to grid layouts.
In case you want to go the more flexible route and support not worry too much about certain ranges of resolutions (mobile devices probably nonwithstanding), consider liquid layouts.
I 100% agree with #Yannis this, its a target audience question. 1024 wide is a good baseline for a worldwide audience, but if you're website isn't for the 'average' internet user you may have a really good reason to use a wider (or narrower layout). For example if you are targeting power users 1280 or even 1600 may be acceptable.
Another possiblity would be to use a variable layout which many modern sites use. This means adjusting your width (or even your whole css) based on the current users browser width. This gives a really sleek feel to your sites.
One really good example of the usage of a variable layout is inside the Trello application.
1024x768 should be ok. But find out what resolution the person signing the check uses and try to develop a liquid layout to avoid side scrolling.
Related
I have thought about working with TIA Portal a lot recently.
My eyes are still good, but I can feel the stress when working with TIA.
This question is here to discuss the pro's and con's of different methods to improve working with TIA and care for ones eyes.
My Notebook has a full-HD screen with 17 Inches.
If I work with TIA, I do not just have the TIA open, but need a variety of other applications, like Browser, Excel, specialized tools, PDF-Reader.......
The operating system is Windows 10.
At the moment I decided, to reduce the screen resolution so all texts within TIA are comfortably readable.
The big disadvantage are applications, that are designed for higher resolutions.
I can't change the resolution based on the application in focus.
If there would only be an option within TIA, but I can't find one.
Any thoughts about improving the situation are highly appreciated to keep peoples eyes healthy.
A few ideas:
Use the display scaling in Windows 10 instead of changing the resolution. You can find it at Settings > System > Display. (see this answer as well)
I use a second 24" display for the programming work in the office, which is about 80% of the time.
I am designing a web app from scratch, which would be a fluid-based layout and the same HTML would render on different screens using the adaptive CSS.
I am going to use adaptive CSS (or responsive design) for this.
I was looking to use a framework like SCSS (http://sass-lang.com/) which would improve my code maintenance efforts. I'll have lots of CSS files (and probably some skin based as well)
Since I am using adaptive layout, I am going to use CSS Media Queries for desktop/tablet/mobile CSS. I could not get an idea how well the SCSS would integrate with media queries and overall speaking , how much flexibility will it offer to me.
Please let me know your suggestions if you have used SASS/SCSS and in general, any other suggestions.
SCSS is essentially an extension to CSS, and is useful (with mixins) to void repetition in your code. It also provides a way to group blocks of CSS in semantically meaningful ways and gives you variables to avoid repeating yourself.
If you are using a framework such as Rails, it is no-brainer.
There are also frameworks which focus on layout such as 960 (and its variants), and Blueprint which also adds code for thing like buttons.
The underlying philosophy behind many of these is DRY (don't repeat yourself). One bonus of using an established framework is that many of the browser issues have been ironed out, so you can be sure that it will work cross-browser.
It is true that perhaps the code is not quite a lean as rolling your own, but with careful editing and making sure you minify the result and send it gzipped, this is not a major issue except on the most high traffic sites.
Personally I have objected to using frameworks in the past because of the small amount of additional redundant code, but after 15 years of hacking around browser issues, I now think they are a Good Thing.
Larry Wall said in Programming Perl, "We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
Anything that allows more people to use CSS in a repeatable and reliable way, to build on work done by other, and to try out some of the leading edge features has got be a good thing.
Engineering a site with media queries is still a bit leading edge. There are compromises in each approach and you should read up as much as possible before choosing one. Adapt.js is a good alternative if you don't mind javascript.
You may want to look into the HTML5 Boilerplate. This has some useful defaults, and lots of documentation about the HTML and CSS defaults that have been chosen.
Good luck!
I have not used media queries together with SCSS, but I don't think they conflict with each other. I have used SCSS extensively in my current rails apps, and it helped me to reduce the amount of code, and get a better understanding when to use which styles.
The tricky part will be what to have fluid (changing depending on the medias viewport size), and how to avoid repetition.
Have a look at the nice site Responsive Design with CSS3 Media Queries, to get an idea which parts of your layout may be fluid.
Have a look at 320+Susy (GitHub repo here). It uses the Susy grid framework extension for Compass. All of these tools are based on Sass and make use of media queries.
This question has been asked in various guises. However. this is a slightly different take on things. By web application, I mean an ultra lightweight frontend - ideally an HTML page with form and regular buttons, with as little dependence on heavyweight JS libraries like jQuery as possible.
The goal is simple. I want to write a simple forms based application for use accross various mobile devices. I thought going the HTML route would be the simpler route (since browsers get around the whole cross platform issue) but even the browser approach seems problematic because of differing screen sizes on mobiles.
I have two questions:
For a simple form based application like I have in mind (possible 3-4 screens in total), I think the browser based approach gives more bang for my buck - am I missing a trick?
Are there any resources that someone can point me to for:
a useful reference for minimum (i.e. lowest common denominator) window size (I forget the technical term for the visible part of a page)
perhaps an example that will show a simple HTML page that will render correctly accross multiple devices?
The HTML5 mobile boilerplate will probably answer a lot of the questions about how to best get things to work across browsers:
http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile/
They have example markup and template implementations for things like browser/device specific CSS hacks, getting a custom launcher icon across different device styles, and implementing offline digest.
You really need to answer two questions before you pick a platform. First, what mobile devices and/or device capabilities are your lowest common denominator? There are lots of variable capabilities between most of those platforms -- screen size, input method, platform speed and mobile platform to name a few. Second, what is your connection requirement? Completely different issue building something targeting spotty or no connectivity versus a fully connected app.
Then you can start thinking about what tool(s) might get you there. In general, a very, very simple HTML site will look okish on most platforms you list. I wouldn't roll with HTML5 functionality because you've got serious limitations there. And HTML/web apps are kind of moot if you need things to work with limited connectivity.
iOS (webkit), Android (webkit) and BB OS6 (webkit-ish), are fairly easy to develop for.
Windows 7 should be, but who knows? They aren't promising HTML5 support until end of year.
BB OS5 browser sucks if you hope to be doing DOM manipulation or fancy JS event listeners. It's really buggy.
Nokia...it's a crap shoot. Granted, they have about one year left before they ditch their OS anyways.
Screen sizes are an issue, as is the fact you can change the orientation. But that can be gotten around with some careful planning.
HTML5/CSS/JS is definitely the way forward for making cross-platform apps as easy as possible...be it in the browser, or as a compiled app.
I've done a bit of iPhone development (3 apps in the appstore currently) but the interface has been pretty plain. I've used the stock components for the most part (UITableViewController, etc.) with a little bit of customization, but for the most part everything looks pretty generic. I'd like to get started developing apps with a richer user interface, but haven't found any good resources to get me started.
What resources have you all come across that outline how to create more advanced iOS interfaces (both iPhone and iPad)? Books? Blog entries? Just looking at the apps I have installed right now, some of the interfaces I've been very impressed with are the ESPN Score Center, XFINITY TV, Facebook, etc.
What about 3rd party interface component libraries? Are there any you recommend that provide more advanced interface components than those in the stock iOS library?
I'd love to take a look at any resources that you recommend for getting started.
I love Ray Wenderlich's tutorials. He's got one on Core Graphics which allows you to draw your own Table Views with headers, buttons, and bezier-curved footers!
Here's a little secret that often gets overlooked: a lot of the cool UI elements you see are stock Apple elements that have been customised to the brink of no return.
The main reason for this is Apple have put a lot of time and effort into making components that just plain work. A UIScrollView, for example, has had many more combined hours of testing than any app you write could hope to achieve.
The trick is to know exactly how to customise elements. A UITabBar is a good example: I've seen several apps that use their own custom tab bars. The problem is, often they don't handle edge cases particularly well. You might have issues if somebody tries to hit two items at the same time (I've actually seen an app that used their own implementation of a tab-bar crash if you pressed two items at the same time).
But if you use Apple's UITabBarController and either subclass, categorise, or otherwise overload it to get the customisation you want, you get a lot of the low-level event handling stuff for free.
You would be amazed with what you can do with a UITableViewController, and you get things like view recycling for free (some of the apps I've worked on have things like independent cell resizing, customised animation of cells, horizontal implementations of a tableview, etc).
Not a particularly useful answer, I grant you, but the point I want to get across here is once you've designed your kick-ass UI step back and consider what can be achieved with the existing toolset before rolling your own. You'll thank me when you come to bug fixing!
I also like Three20. Until now I didn't use it in my projects, but I played with it. And there's some really cool stuff in it. ;-) I think that's one way to extend your standard User Interfaces.
Another really cool part is designing your own elements. I like this really. Because you then have in your App something nobody else has. :-D
I've started looking into using Opacity for Mac, it's a pretty neat desktop application where you can generate your own graphical elements (buttons, switches, icons, etc) and then automatically generate the CocoaTouch / Quartz2D classes and headers to drop in your app ... Some elements work best when they're natively drawn on the device, rather than stored/loaded as pngs, or whatever. Moreover, you get #2x Retina display support for free. While not an interface dress-up framework, the fact that it generates Quartz2D code for you makes this a real contender for anyone who's remotely graphically creative but short on complex 2D programming skills.
Speaking of beautiful interfaces, if you're looking for inspiration or actual graphical elements to put in your interface, I frequently get some great ideas at 365psd ... they actually provide the Photoshop documents to reproduce some eye dropping UI goods, for FREE. Some places may just give you a PNG, but this does little good if you want to scale it (#2x or iPad) or customize it to fit your needs. It's like open source for graphical UI design.
I need to implement cover flow in our iphone app. Our app need to display images from server. We already have webservice to return list of pictures. Number of pictures will grow over time to 1000s of pictures.
Here I need your help to decide which library is good for my situation without any memory issues. and any experiences you have in similar scenario.
I appreciate any input you can give in my scenario
Here is list of libraries in mind.
tapkul
OpenFlow
FlowCover
Please help deciding which library to use and
I can't help on the issue of which library is best to use, but be aware apps have been rejected in the past for doing including cover-flow like features.
If you really must include cover-flow functionality, I'd recommend you write a little test app with each of the available libraries and see which fits your requirements the best. You might also try memory profiling the different solutions and see which consumes the least resources.
There probably isn't a "one size fits all" answer to this question, as everyone's requirements will be slightly different.