Tools for Mobile GUI Designer & Developer
When, I was employed as a user experience designer by, The Mobile Middleware Development Company. I stayed up until three in the morning without sleeping in the company of new colleagues. The reason was that we should slice GUI designs to embed in LG Arena phone. Although they were simple tasks, it took too much time and I couldn’t accept why we had to work in this fashion because we were hired as designers also, the programmer spent too much time importing those images. However, in a few days past, I realised that a lot of people called designer and programmer work like this and are not appreciated for this kind of work. Therefore, I made a small plug-in for Photoshop. When it loads a piece of GUI image, it automatically slices the image and output GUI guideline. In addition, it also makes a file, which contains guideline information to be accepted directly by a company’s own GUI engine. As a result, a lot of people do not have to spend time on this work.
After I finished this plug-in, I also made an animation editor tool to design motion graphic user interface based on the exported file structure. So, we could slice GUI images and add a motion to those graphic elements. From this experience, I could take a solid sense that if digital media elements became limpid and less linear object to be controlled easily, It would improve our attitude to solve problem constructively.
