I’ve just released AirLink, a dead simple web application for developers that beams url’s from your desktop browser to an iPhone, iPod Touch or (theoretically) and other mobile device.
You no longer have to struggle with your iPhone keyboard when typing long url’s full of query strings into the device’s browser. AirLink will do the job with just one click.
Give it a try at http://thethingsido.net/airlink.
There are a lot of apps with fantastic looking User Interfaces. The point is, especially if everything feels just “right” and the application is very easy-to-use, the UI you’re looking at is most likely the result of countless hours of concepts, testing and fine tuning. I think it’s interesting how those apps came into being and I’d like to share a couple of articles, where designers documented their apps design process:
Designing Things for iPhone
Cultured Code, the creators of Things Mac & iPhone wrote an interesting in-depth report about the design process of the Things iPhone User Interface.
Read it here: Designing the UI of Things for iPhone
Designing Fontcase
Fontcase is an elegant font manager for Mac. It was designed by Bohemian Coding and has won an Apple Design Award in 2009. Pieter Omvlee, the developer of Fontcase wrote about the UI design process on Macstories.
Check it out: Designing Fontcase
Every time before I put a website online, I do some cross browser tests. And so did I yesterday before I launched this blog. Everything worked like a charme in Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 on my laptop running Windows Vista. Even in Internet Explorer 8, the results where fairly good.
Nevertheless, some people reported in the comments that there would be a lot of CSS bugs.
So what did I do wrong? Well, I had assumed that Safari 4 on my Windows computer would be equal to Safari 4 on a Mac. I also thought that, with testing my layout in Firefox 3.5 on Windows Vista, I’d make sure that it looked the same in Firefox on any Mac or Windows XP/Windows7 computer.
Apparently, it does not. There seem to be some differences. Luckily, I found a fast and easy way to check your layout in different browsers:
Adobe Browserlab
Browserlab is a free flash-based service that lets you create real time screenshots of any webpage in a variety of browsers and operating systems. You can even split your screen and use two browsers at a time. The good thing about is that the two windows scroll simultaneously when you use any of the scroll bars. This makes it easy to compare various elements, like a comment form for example, in different browsers.
In contrast to other free services like Browsershots.org where you have to wait several minutes until you can see the screenshots, Browserlab takes only around 5 seconds to load.
Ok, that’s it. Go and give it a try here: Adobe Browserlab.