Know your limits: Web Design
You might have the best app ever created, or you might have the user friendliest web page in the world. You might even have the most useful piece of shareware ever made and still not making any money.
Know your limits. Just make sure to know your strengths and your weaknesses. If you are on a journey trying to make money online you'd better learn something first.
Competition is strong. Unbelievebly strong.
Even if you have the best product in the world, you aren't going to sell much if the appearence of the web page doesn't reflect the professionalism of the product. Well, you might pull off making a few sales but to really make it you need to make sure your web page looks as good as the product is useful.
Some of my own limits and weaknesses, which I've been trying to overcome for several years are these:
- Web design
- Color Matching
- Appearance
One of my strengths though is to see how to create something user-friendly, or "easy to use". That doesn't matter much to users of my apps or software though, because even if they can use my work without goiing through tons of pages of documentation they aren't even willing to try if the product isn't appealing to the eye.
Which pretty much means I'm doomed. Or does it?
Should you just give up then?
- No of course not! Strive to learn from your mistakes and you'll slowly get better and better. But the one thing I've found that is really really really really useful is that designers are sometimes like programmers. They like to share their brilliance, every once in a while designers comes up with decent libraries that can help us match the appearance to the functionality.
In the case of web design, the library many use is called "twitter bootstrap", and in fact this blog and pretty much every web page I do is based on this css/javascript library. To be honest though, in many cases I can't tell the difference between a proffesional design and a half-good-amateur-basement-stylish-hackup. However, when I use these libraries I don't think my pages stick out as being as but-ugly as they used to when not using them.
Have a look at GetBootstrap.com, and be amazed at the simplicity to quickly generate professional looking designs for your web pages.
User friendly apps, Dialogs part 1
In this first article about how to design user friendly apps we will discuss the use of Dialogs.
Android snippet of the day - Simple Http Post request
So, what we want is this:
- Call a web server asynchronously
- Display a loading dialog during the time it executes
- Present the response html.
This code could easily be used as a base if you need to call a web service that outputs xml
Android snippet of the day - Show Contact Picker
This quickie will get you up and running if you need to display the android built in contact picker to select a phone number with a minimum amount of code.
Know your limits: Web Design
You might have the best app ever created, or you might have the user friendliest web page in the world. You might even have the most useful piece of shareware ever made and still not making any money.
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