Rusty Mitchell

Mercury Intermedia is proud to announce the launch of USA TODAY on the Android platform. This native application offers news, scores, photo galleries at a glance. In addition, users can get weather for their favorite cities or their current location as well as vote on the popular USA TODAY Snapshots, with instant poll results viewable by your state and city.

This application uses some of the best features of the Android OS, including a full-featured rich user interface, GPS, and others, while adhering to the standards of the Android device, making it a comfortable experience for the Android user.

Developing for Android was an interesting experience, as was the challenge of porting from iPhone to Android. We felt strongly that the app itself had to have the look and feel of an Android device, not just create iPhone-ish elements to show up on Android. Some things were easy decisions, such as moving from the bottom oriented TabBarController of the iPhone to the top oriented TabHost in Android. Others were more challenging, such as deciding how to use the physical elements of the G1 (menu button, trackball) vs solely relying on touch screen elements. But all in all, we’re proud of the product, and hope consumers find it easy to use.

We’ve immediately jumped into other projects, but if we can get our heads above water, we’ll post some more of our experiences/pain points/successes.

For more information, go to the Android marketplace on your handset, or go to http://www.usatoday.com/android/

In the comments of my previous post “iPhone UI Vector Elements”, one of our readers asked why we would bother going to the trouble to recreate vector versions of the iPhone user interface. It’s a great question which leads to the larger, more general question of why we would create application mockups in vector format at all.

Stick with what you know
First off, just to clarify, I am a designer. I leave Apple’s developer tools to our programmers and stick to the visual tools that I am most comfortable and familiar with. I am fortunate to be in an environment where quality UI and visual design is valued on the same level as rock solid performance, speed, and reliability. Getting my hands dirty with the developer tools has never really been an option. The developers at Mercury Intermedia handle all of the X-Code and Interface Builder work and do a tremendous job.

Be efficient
Next, I want UI objects that I can quickly and easily modify and manipulate. It is much easier for me to make adjustments to vector objects when I need modified color variations and custom UI elements for new applications. Although the argument could be made for Photoshop, and it certainly has it’s place for more complex or organic visuals such as EA’s Sudoku or Clif Bar’s Save Our Snow for example, the speed and ease of editing and duplicating vector files for standard UI elements in Adobe Illustrator tends to generally be more productive.

Be prepared for the unexpected
Beyond all of this, you never know when scalable graphics may meet unforeseen needs. For example, we had a prominent design publication recently request several print quality screenshots of the USA TODAY application for an upcoming issue. If we hadn’t built this project in vector format, it would have been much more difficult and time consuming to go back and recreate files that the publication could use. We would have likely ended up with less than ideal, tiny screenshots of our app or would have had to set up a photo shoot of the app on the device. Since we had already built all of our mockups in vector format, it made creating these print quality screens much less painful.

Click to view a high resolution example from the USA TODAY iPhone app
(This file is 1200×1800 and will scale to fit the height of your browser window.)

Plan for the future
Finally, it is almost imperative at this point to build applications with higher resolution devices in mind. As Sebastiaan de With recently hypothesized in his Cocoia Blog post “Not hosed (for now)”, “In the future, Apple will change to a better (not necessarily ‘bigger’) screen, and developers of iPhone apps will face a huge issue: how do we scale the interface?” There is no clear road map as to when this could happen, but I do agree that it is likely to be an issue at some point.

Arguably more pressing than the possibility of an iPhone screen resolution change is the possibility of a new Apple portable form factor altogether. What if Apple follows through as the rumors have recently suggested and releases a Kindle sized tablet device? What if that device has an App Store environment? We would like to be prepared if our clients come to us wanting their applications ported to such a device. Not that we would port an iPhone application as is over to a device that much larger, but we would certainly have a huge head start.

In conclusion
There are certainly talented developers out there who can handle the majority of their standard iPhone visuals directly in Interface Builder. Others out there who might turn to a graphics based application, have spent years in Photoshop and would find Illustrator so foreign as to greatly reduce some of the above mentioned advantages. However, for those of us comfortable and familiar with Illustrator, it is an excellent tool for user interface design and holds many advantages. If you have been considering exploring Illustrator further for UI work, I would highly recommend it.

Most of the visuals for our applications start out as vector mockups in Adobe Illustrator. So when we started working on the USA TODAY iPhone app, we went looking for vector UI elements. Although there are a few good Photoshop resources and even a nice OmniGraffle iPhone UI file or two out there, we couldn’t find anything in vector format.

Rather than cry over the lack of good vector elements, we took it upon ourselves to recreate a large portion of the iPhone’s UI elements so we would have them available for future projects. Obviously, we aren’t telling you all of this just to wave it in your face and tell you we have fancy tools that you don’t. Because we care so much about our fellow iPhone developers, we are making our vector files available to you today. (I think I just made myself throw up a little.)

So you are probably asking, “Billy Mays*, how much is this going to set me back?” If you act now, this priceless file can be yours absolutely free. You heard me correctly, absolutely FREE!

Click on the images below for a preview of the elements included. (Of course you’ll need to download the Illustrator file to see everything in its full vector glory.)

Download iPhone UI Vector Elements Now (2.6MB)

For Photoshop iPhone UI files check out Teehan+Lax’s iPhone GUI PSD. For OmniGraffle iPhone UI files, Patrick Crowley’s Ultimate iPhone Stencil is excellent.

* Mercury Intermedia’s free iPhone UI vector elements file is in no way endorsed by Billy Mays, though it would be awesome if it were.

Update: I posted a followup to this article addressing the advantages of using vector files for user interface projects. “Why build iPhone app mockups in vector format?”

Welcome to the Mercury Intermedia blog. We’re going to be posting here from time to time to announce new features and projects, share ideas, explore new topics in development, and share riveting tales about the questionable carpet choices building management made during building renovation.

So the first post here is of the announcement variety. We just pushed version 1.1 of USA TODAY for iPhone/iPod touch to the App Store today. This particular version expands upon the ways in which a user can share articles from the phone, including additional Twitter client support (Tweetie, Twittelator, TwitterFon now join Twitterrific on the supported Twitter client list), as well as integration with the new Facebook Connect for iPhone API.

Two other items of note:

1. Greatly improved LBS support: we had two LBS issues. First off, the app had a tendency to hold on to previous locations, which affected travelers who would be physically onto another location, but virtually stuck in their previous location according to our app. Secondly, the accuracy of our our location detection was in many cases just off, putting someone in neighboring cities. There will always be issues with iPod Touch LBS, and some issues with first gen iPhones, but in general, we’ve tightened up the Current Location process.

2. Sticky slider bar: we’re big fans of the slider bar as a method of navigation, immediately choosing to adopt it after seeing it’s effectiveness in the Facebook iPhone app. However, while our slider bar worked well for flick motions, it didn’t respond well to press and hold actions. That’s been taken care of as well - now you can take all the time you want,  indecisive section navigator guy!

There were a handful of other fixes, but we’re pleased to offer the additional Twitter support as well as Facebook integration. We’ve got much more in store for the app in the coming months, and we’ll expound as we can.

Thanks for reading, and hope to see you ’round these parts again real soon.