Why is it important to dedicate enough time to design your app? let me show you how we did it for Conqu, what worked, and what didn't work.

It's possible that AsFusion was bitten by the app bug. Soon after releasing Conqu, we decided to create another app called OnePound. OnePound is a weight tracking app for Android tablets, BlackBerry PlayBook, and the Nook.

One of the components that is very common in a mobile app is the Switcher component. The on/off switch is usually available on IOS and Android devices. This component is like a toggle button but with a skin that makes it look as a Switcher.

This is part 5 of my series on item renderers. As you may know, the Mobile Flex Framework does not have a DataGrid, mostly because a DataGrid control uses a lot of real state and the phone has a small screen. But, we have tablets too and a Grid makes complete sense. However, the regular flex DataGrid will not work as it is too heavy for that. We also want gestures and bouncing like the mobile List has. So the workaround is to make an ItemRenderer that mimics a grid.

This is part 4 of my series on item renderers. This time we have a more real example that includes two states (selected and up) plus and avatar image and a bunch of text fields.

What I choose as the example is a TweetRenderer that shows the picture of the user, the user name and the content of the tweet.

This is Part 3 of the series "Mobile ItemRenderer in ActionScript". This time we are going to use a different option to add the drop shadows to the text. We will be using a filter instead of having an extra text field.

This is Part 2 of my series "Mobile ItemRenderers in ActionScript". This time I will explore how to apply drop shadows using a second TextField.

If you are starting to do mobile development and are used to create all your ItemRenderers in MXML, you may notice that the small devices like phones and tablets do not perform as well as the desktop does and you need to start looking closely to different ways to optimize you app.

...when running your app on a small, high screen-density device.

As you may know, we are developing a GTD application that runs on the Blackberry Playbook and Android tablets (others to come) called Conqu. When we started, back in November, we were making designs as normal with Photoshop at the right size, and what we liked the most when looking at the designs (even when made small to fit the size of the device) were usually not all that good on the device. Since we hadn't developed the app yet, we only had mockup images to see. So what we did was browse those images to see how the actual app would look like.

This is what we learned.

The idea for Conqu was hashed long before the Android or Blackberry tablets were even a rumor. However, the idea sat on the back burner for several years until finally the first production tablet devices were on demo at Adobe MAX in late 2010. At that point the hardware finally caught up to the requirements of such an app. It was time to un-shelf the idea and put forth the effort to create an exceptional app for the Blackberry Playbook.