Ui Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

HTC completes workaround to get past Apple's patent ban

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 21st, 2011)

HTC said it was pleased with a recent patent infringement ruling from the ITC, because it involves a simple UI element that was easy to fix. It appears the company was not exaggerating as the workaround is already completed. HTC infringed patent (#5,946,647) which describes a "system and ...

Apple to improve Notification Center with fresh talent

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 14th, 2011)

Apple is looking outside its ranks and hiring a college student to help revise its iOS notification system. This isn't any college student. The new hire is Jan-Michael Cart, the whizkid who created a clever mocked up Notification Center redesign and then posted it to YouTube. Cart will join ...

On UI inconsistency in iOS 5

by Chris Rawson (Dec 6th, 2011)

A while back, designer Jake Marsh commented on an inconsistency in Apple's use of linen textures in iOS 5 (hat tip to Daring Fireball). In both OS X Lion and iOS 5, the linen texture is "underneath" other UI elements in almost every instance. In Lion, linen textures lie beneath the Mission ...

Why Siri is like skeuomorphic UIs: the magic is just skin deep

by Richard Gaywood (Dec 1st, 2011)

By now you've probably heard of the widely reported case of Siri's alleged pro-life stance. Walking the dogs this morning, I thought through what I hoped would be an interesting blog post about what I feel this means about Apple and our relationship to technology. I see an interesting link here ...

Former Apple interface expert rants on Microsoft's "Vision of the Future" video

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Nov 10th, 2011)

A few weeks ago Microsoft came out with a future of productivity video proposing a very touchscreen-based future for us humans. A former human-computer interface inventor for Apple, Brett Victor, has picked apart this video in a beautifully designed "rant" on his site, essentially taking ...

Dev Juice: Help me fix my UIView animations

by Erica Sadun (Jun 21st, 2011)

Dear Dev Juice, I'm having an issue with UIView animations, that I'm struggling to describe in keywords, so I can't find anything helpful with Google. The problem is that I can't seem to work out how to make a UIButton move relative to the bottom of the parent view, as I shrink the parent ...

Usability study finds many iPad apps still need to work on their UI

by Chris Rawson (May 27th, 2011)

The Nielsen Norman Group did a usability study on iPad apps not long after the device's debut in 2010. A year later, they've done a followup study to see how things fare today. While most apps have made big strides in overall usability in the year since the iPad's debut, many of the apps covered ...

Apple scraps iOS-like slider tabs in latest Mac OS X Lion build

by Michael Grothaus (Apr 30th, 2011)

Hear that? It's a big sigh of relief from Mac users everywhere. In the latest Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Preview Developer Build, Apple has scrapped the switch/slider tabs that were borrowed UI elements from iOS. As you can see from the image above, Apple has chosen to move away from the Aqua ...

iPad apps produce unique fingerprint patterns

by Mike Schramm (Feb 11th, 2011)

You may have seen click heatmaps before -- they're a visual representation of where user mice have clicked on a web page. The iPad, as this post from Design Language News shows, has its own built-in heatmap: the oils and residue left on the iPad's screen after you use a certain app. It's kind of ...

Put a Windows Phone 7 theme on your iPhone

by David Quilty (Feb 1st, 2011)

Been trying to think of a way to try out a new Windows phone without crossing over to the dark side switching sides? If that's the case and you have been looking for a way to recreate the Windows Phone 7 interactive theme on your iPhone or iPod touch, Wyndwarrior's "OS7" is available in public beta ...

Chopper 2 for Mac controlled by iPhone

by Mike Schramm (Nov 29th, 2010)

You've probably seen Chopper 2 here on TUAW before -- we originally covered the app's iPad-out-to-TV feature and then chatted with creator David Frampton back at WWDC last year. With the news of the Mac App Store coming soon, Frampton has decided to port the game over to the Mac, and since he ...

TUAW's Daily App: FlightBoard

by Mike Schramm (Oct 18th, 2010)

I can't say I'm a huge traveler -- even though I've hit up quite a few conventions this year for work, I haven't been flying so much that I need to keep tabs on what's going on at the airport. But I like the idea of FlightBoard anyway. It's an app that will automatically create a departing flights ...

iPhone Post It Notes take your Apple love analog

by Dave Caolo (Aug 11th, 2010)

Here's a useful tool for developers who want to sketch out UI ideas for iPhone apps. These clever Post-It Notes from Apps-on and 3M have a 20 pixel grid on the drawing surface, and feature the exact dimensions of the iPhone 4. So, you can draw your ideas in a perfect 1:1 scale. There are 50 sheets ...

Three apps for iPhone that look great on iPad

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (May 14th, 2010)

Universal binaries? These apps don't need no stinking universal binaries! That is, the following three apps are not tuned for iPads. A universal binary will switch to the "iPad version" of the app for that device. So you might have MobileStudio on your iPhone, but it also looks great on the iPad ...

Marking out iPhone app icons on the iPad

by TJ Luoma (May 10th, 2010)

David Frampton has an interesting idea for how to display non-universal iPhone apps on the iPad: put a black border around them, much like how iPhone apps will display if they are not scaled-up. I think it's a brilliant idea. It makes them distinguishable, but at the same time seems not too ...