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December 14th, 2009

As the name of this blog implies, my passion is to put pixels on screen. I’ve been doing this for about 23 years now, and last 10 doing it professionally. This has started from the TV-connected consoles, and continued into such projects as Substance and Flamingo that are using the full flexibility of the Swing UI toolkit. Over the last few years i’ve been following the developments in competing offerings, such as Silverlight / WPF, Flash / Flex, Qt, SWT and many browsers-based libraries, with the particular eye on the mobile devices.

The mobile devices have enjoyed enormous capabilities growth over the last few years – mainly driven by the simple market laws. As long as the consumers are willing to pay for the new hardware (and the accompanying software), the companies are happy to divert ever growing resources to satisfy those needs. The desktop / laptop manufacturers, of course, have not stopped pushing their own research facilities, but one of the major attraction of mobile devices lies in the very definition of “mobile”. Features such as accelerometer and GPS are simply not relevant to the desktop machines, and i am still waiting to see a single video that highlights how an application running on the laptop switches between landscape and portrait mode when the user rotates the laptop.

Augmented reality is a particularly blooming field for modern mobile devices. As with any new tool, it is easily overused (something which i have been guilty of), but then you have such incredibly ingenious applications as Sun Seeker:

Most of the applications that overlay directions to the nearest underground station answer a question that can be easily answered by (hopefully friendly) passer-byes. However, if you are a professional photographer scouting a new site for the wedding pictures, or a young couple visiting an open house that wants to know that there is enough sun on the back patio in the summer for the kids to play – Sun Seeker is pretty much the only way that can give you a real answer – with an extra bonus of dynamic visual overlays over the current scenery.

Here is another small video that i happened across:

This lies much closer to my heart – how far can you push the user interaction by manipulating the pixels. Note that i’m not necessarily saying that it’s a good user experience. The reliance on thumb agility might be a little too much, and the animations are a little over the top, but i’m mostly seeing how far the hardware of mobile devices has progressed over the last couple of years.

And finally, today I am thrilled to officially become the member of Android team.

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