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My latest project: HD Widgets for Honeycomb tablets

August 23, 2011
 · 
2 min read

Mike and I are launching a new app this week: HD Widgets. This is our first paid app, following up on Cloudskipper, our free music player which has skyrocketed to over 425k installs in just three months.

HD Widgets follows our Mixwit formula: take something simple, make it attractive and fun, and make it easy for users to be able to customize and personalize it. The app includes a dozen widgets with a variety of clocks, backgrounds, layouts, and options. The UI of the app itself has a lot of slide-based navigation - the pages can be swiped, the menu, and all of the options - so it's fun and really intuitive to use.

There were a few challenges. First off was the design challenge of dealing with portrait/landscape layouts for both widgets and apps on a 10:9 screen. Another was figuring out how to build a platform to allow hundreds of widget designs and styles without flooding the OS widget menu. As such we needed dynamic widgets even though they require static layouts. We also had to deal with matching our look and feel to the new Honeycomb theme while still making the app intuitive ;-)

The next challenge for us is making it work on smaller screens: scaling down the app while still providing the same fun, swiping experience. We also have to deal with differences in the different OS versions. We avoided stuff like fragments, but there may be other differences we're yet to uncover.

Anyways, that's my intro. I'll try to put something together on Honeycomb UI/UX shortly. I'm crammed for time so it will either happen immediately or not until much later.

In the meantime, please download HD Widgets for your Honeycomb tablet and have fun with it.

Last and least, here's the logo/icon I made for the app using Illustrator and Swift3D:

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