Smartphone Screens – Another Wireless Variable
This is a good item to read as a follow-up on the Wireless Application Market article. Regardless of what platform you’ve decided to develop for, UI design is going to be another issue for you. Not unlike web development, page size is one of the the first areas you should address. Specifically, what is the minimum screen width you should support?
One option is a design that will scale horizontally and vertically, another is designing and implementing multiple screens for a variety of screen sizes. I’ll go out on a limb and say a scalable design is preferable if it’s possible for your application.
Which Screen Sizes?
Some great research has been done on Mobile Screen Size Trends over at a blog by Sender11.
Note: screen size is usually listed width x height.
The gist is that QVGA is the most common phone screen size right now, meaning supporting a width of 240 is essential. The top end screens are rapidly increasing in both size and pixel density.
How to Get Support Screen Sizes?
Certainly not the only way to get there, just one option for how to get closer to scalable layouts.
This is an area web UI designers are going to find familiar as well. If possible applications should be drawn by screen percentage, really this is just like using tables in HTML. In fact, my personal choice for a UI Toolkit for J2ME is a product called KUIX, which uses a layout system called TableLayout which is fairly close to HTML tables. Certainly not the only way to get there, just one option for how to get closer to scalable layouts.