Early user interface (UI) practitioners were trained in cognitive psychology, from which UI design rules were based. But as the field evolves, designers enter the field from many disciplines. Practitioners today have enough experience in UI design that they have been exposed to design rules, but it is essential that they understand the psychology behind the rules in order to effectively apply them. In Designing with the Mind in Mind, Jeff Johnson, author of the best selling GUI Bloopers, provides designers with just enough background in perceptual and cognitive psychology that UI design guidelines make intuitive sense rather than being just a list of rules to follow.

Meet the Kinect introduces the exciting world of volumetric computing using the Microsoft Kinect. You'll learn to write scripts and software enabling the use of the Kinect as an input device. Interact directly with your computer through physical motion. The Kinect will read and track body movements, and is the bridge between the physical reality in which you exist and the virtual world created by your software.

Microsoft’s Kinect was released in fall 2010 to become the fastest-selling electronic device ever. For the first time, we have an inexpensive, three-dimensional sensor enabling direct interaction between human and computer, between the physical world and the virtual. The Kinect has been enthusiastically adopted by a growing culture of enthusiasts, who put it to work in creating technology-based art projects, three-dimensional scanners, adaptive devices for sight-impaired individuals, new ways of interacting with PCs, and even profitable business opportunities.

Meet the Kinect is the resource to get you started in mastering the Kinect and the exciting possibilities it brings. You’ll learn about the Kinect hardware and what it can do. You’ll install drivers and learn to download and run the growing amount of Kinect software freely available on the Internet. From there, you’ll move into writing code using some of the more popular frameworks and APIs, including the official Microsoft API and the language known as Processing that is popular in the art and creative world.

Along the way, you’ll learn principles and terminology. Volumetric computing didn’t begin with the Kinect. The field is decades old—if you’ve ever had an MRI, for example, you have benefitted from volumetric computing technology. Meet the Kinect goes beyond just the one device to impart the principles and terminology underlying the exciting field of volumetric computing that is now wide-open and accessible to the average person.

What you’ll learn

• Install drivers to connect your Kinect to your PC, whether running Windows or Mac OSX
• Download and run the growing body of software freely available via the Internet
• Write scripts in the popular Processing language
• Take advantage of Microsoft’s Kinect SDK for Windows
• Choose a software development environment that suits your needs
• Grasp principles and terminology underlying the Kinect technology

Who this book is for

Meet the Kinect is aimed at technology enthusiasts, including programmers, artists, and entrepreneurs who are fascinated by the possibilities arising from the direct, human-computer interaction enabled by the Microsoft Kinect. The book is for anyone who wants to take advantage of the growing body of software for the Kinect, and for those who wish to write their own programs and scripts involving the Kinect as an input device.

Table of Contents

1. Getting Started
2. Behind the Technology
3. Applications in the Wild
4. Scripting the Kinect
5. Many Ways to Kinect
6. Application Development with PrimeSense's NITE Framework
7. Application Development with the Beckon Framework
8. Application Development with Microsoft's Windows/XBOX Framework
9. Volumetric Display Techniques
10. Where to Go From Here?

A must have guide for creating engaging and usable SharePoint 2010 branding

With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has provided a more robust environment for creating collaboration and content management sites that rival any of the popular websites on the internet. Creating a branded SharePoint site involves understanding both traditional web design techniques as well as topics that are typically reserved for developers. This book bridges that gap by not only providing expert guidance for creating beautiful public facing and internal intranet sites but it also addresses the needs of those readers that only want to understand the basics enough to apply some style to their sites.

Things like creative design, the experience visitors have navigating your user interface, ease of use?these are all important branding considerations and not always intuitive. This unique book from a team of SharePoint branding experts lays it all out. The book is divided into four sections:

• Introduction to SharePoint Branding: In this part you will learn about what SharePoint branding is and how the topic has changed since SharePoint 2007.
• Branding Basics: This section is geared towards both getting started as well as being a guide for people that don?t want to dive super deep into the advanced topics of SharePoint branding. You will learn about how to plan for branding projects, including creating wireframes and creative mockups as well as gathering requirements and estimation. You will learn how to work with SharePoint Designer 2010, SharePoint 2010 themes, and SharePoint navigation as well as gain an understanding of the low and medium effort approaches to branding can be used to make SharePoint look more like your own visual style.
• Advanced Branding: This is where you will learn about the more intricate techniques for making large changes to the SharePoint UI, such as cascading style sheets (CSS), master pages, page layouts, web parts and XSLT. You will also get an introduction to deploying SharePoint branding to production servers using solution packages (WSP).
• Other Topics: Everything else that is related to SharePoint branding is discussed here, including working with the SharePoint 2010 ribbon and client side technologies such as the client object model, jQuery, and Silverlight.

Whether you want to make SharePoint look completely different or just make minor design changes, this expert guide will provide tips, techniques, and insights to get the job done.

An example-based approach leads you step-by-step through the implementation and customization of each library component and its associated resources. Reference tables of each configuration option, method, and event for each component are provided, alongside detailed explanations of how each widget is used. This book is for front-end designers and developers who need to quickly learn how to use jQuery UI. To get the most out of this book you should have a good working knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and should ideally be comfortable using jQuery.

Android User Interface made easy is ideal for beginners as it not only covers the User Interface in detail, but also includes 34 tutorials with line by line commentary: The areas covered are:
User Interface - a brief overview of the User Interface introducing the key components; Views, ViewGroups, Layouts, UI Events, Menus, Adapters, Styles and Themes.
Declaring layouts - the layout defines the arrangement of the elements on the screen. It also contains all these elements. We cover layouts here in more detail, explaining how to create a layout file and how to use it in your application.
Creating menus - Android uses Option and Context menus. We cover both in detail using a tutorial.
Creating dialogs - dialogs are the small windows appearing in front of your application screen from time to time, usually requesting some sort of action from you in connection with the application. We cover dialogs in detail here and include tutorials for the following: Alert Dialog, DatePicker Dialog, TimePicker Dialog, Custom Dialog, Progress Dialog, Progress Bar Dialog and the SeekBar Dialog.
Handling User Interface events - this section covers how the application responds to the user touching the screen, clicking buttons and entering text. It includes an Event Listener tutorial.
Notifying the user - sometimes the system needs to notify the user about something concerning the application. It does so in three ways, through a Dialog, which we have mentioned and through Toast messages and Status Bar Notifications. We cover the latter two here in detail and include a Toast tutorial and a Status Bar Notifications tutorial.
Applying Styles and Themes - Styles and Themes determine the look of your application, the size, shape and color of the elements. We cover both here in detail and include a Style tutorial as well as a Theme tutorial.
Creating reusable components - Android allows you to reuse components that you create. Here we cover how to reuse your layouts with include, merge and ViewStub. We work through tutorials for each of these. We also cover building Custom Components and include tutorials for: Modifying an existing view, Compound Components and fully Customized Components.
Binding data with adapterview - the adapterview's role is to fill the view with data and then to deal with the user's selection afterwards. We cover this in detail using tutorials for the Spinner, ListView and GridView.
Common layout objects - here we cover the layouts in detail and include tutorials for the following: FrameLayout, LinearLayout, TableLayout, RelativeLayout, SlidingDrawer layout, Gallery, GridView, ListView, ScrollView, Spinner, Tab, ImageSwitcher, TextSwitcher and ViewFlipper.
Widgets - widgets are view objects that allow the user to interact with the application. We cover widgets in detail here and include a tutorial.
Appendix - here we briefly define terms such as: RemoteViews, Intents, Application Components, Threads, Runnable, Handler, Adapters, Context, Constructors and Services. We also include brief tutorials on: Creating a new project in Eclipse, Working with layout files in Eclipse, Working with Strings and Working with Dimensions.
Android User Interface made easy covers all aspects of the user interface so after working through the tutorials you will confidently be able to develop good looking, functional Android applications.
Learn how to effectively use Layouts, Styles and Themes, Menus, Dialogs, Custom components and much, much more by working through the 34 tutorials. Includes over 150 color images.
All project files can be downloaded from www.101apps.co.za

Android User Interface made easy is ideal for beginners as it not only covers the User Interface in detail, but also includes 34 tutorials with line by line commentary: The areas covered are:
User Interface - a brief overview of the User Interface introducing the key components; Views, ViewGroups, Layouts, UI Events, Menus, Adapters, Styles and Themes.
Declaring layouts - the layout defines the arrangement of the elements on the screen. It also contains all these elements. We cover layouts here in more detail, explaining how to create a layout file and how to use it in your application.
Creating menus - Android uses Option and Context menus. We cover both in detail using a tutorial.
Creating dialogs - dialogs are the small windows appearing in front of your application screen from time to time, usually requesting some sort of action from you in connection with the application. We cover dialogs in detail here and include tutorials for the following: Alert Dialog, DatePicker Dialog, TimePicker Dialog, Custom Dialog, Progress Dialog, Progress Bar Dialog and the SeekBar Dialog.
Handling User Interface events - this section covers how the application responds to the user touching the screen, clicking buttons and entering text. It includes an Event Listener tutorial.
Notifying the user - sometimes the system needs to notify the user about something concerning the application. It does so in three ways, through a Dialog, which we have mentioned and through Toast messages and Status Bar Notifications. We cover the latter two here in detail and include a Toast tutorial and a Status Bar Notifications tutorial.
Applying Styles and Themes - Styles and Themes determine the look of your application, the size, shape and color of the elements. We cover both here in detail and include a Style tutorial as well as a Theme tutorial.
Creating reusable components - Android allows you to reuse components that you create. Here we cover how to reuse your layouts with include, merge and ViewStub. We work through tutorials for each of these. We also cover building Custom Components and include tutorials for: Modifying an existing view, Compound Components and fully Customized Components.
Binding data with adapterview - the adapterview's role is to fill the view with data and then to deal with the user's selection afterwards. We cover this in detail using tutorials for the Spinner, ListView and GridView.
Common layout objects - here we cover the layouts in detail and include tutorials for the following: FrameLayout, LinearLayout, TableLayout, RelativeLayout, SlidingDrawer layout, Gallery, GridView, ListView, ScrollView, Spinner, Tab, ImageSwitcher, TextSwitcher and ViewFlipper.
Widgets - widgets are view objects that allow the user to interact with the application. We cover widgets in detail here and include a tutorial.
Appendix - here we briefly define terms such as: RemoteViews, Intents, Application Components, Threads, Runnable, Handler, Adapters, Context, Constructors and Services. We also include brief tutorials on: Creating a new project in Eclipse, Working with layout files in Eclipse, Working with Strings and Working with Dimensions.
Android User Interface made easy covers all aspects of the user interface so after working through the tutorials you will confidently be able to develop good looking, functional Android applications.
Learn how to effectively use Layouts, Styles and Themes, Menus, Dialogs, Custom components and much, much more by working through the 34 tutorials. Includes over 150 color images.
All project files can be downloaded from www.101apps.co.za

KEY BENEFIT: Provides a broad survey of designing, implementing, managing, maintaining, training, and refining the user interface of interactive systems. KEY TOPICS: Usability of Interactive systems; Guidelines, Principles, and Theories; Managing Design Processes; Evaluating Interface Designs; Direct Manipulation and Virtual Environments; Menu Selection, Form Fills, and Dialog Boxes; Command and Natural Languages; Interaction Devices; Collaboration; Quality of Service; Balancing Function and Fashion; User Documentation and Online Help; Information Search; Information Visualization; Societal and Individual Impact of User Interfaces. MARKET: An ideal reference for HCI professionals.

Touch and gestural devices have been hailed as next evolutionary step in human-computer interaction. As software companies struggle to catch up with one another in terms of developing the next great touch-based interface, designers are charged with the daunting task of keeping up with the advances in new technology and this new aspect to user experience design.

Product and interaction designers, developers and managers are already well versed in UI design, but touch-based interfaces have added a new level of complexity. They need quick references and real-world examples in order to make informed decisions when designing for these particular interfaces. Brave NUI World is the first practical book for product and interaction developers and designing touch and gesture interfaces. Written by developers of industry-first, multi-touch, multi-user products, this book gives you the necessary tools and information to integrate touch and gesture practices into your daily work, presenting scenarios, problem solving, metaphors, and techniques intended to avoid making mistakes.

*Provides easy-to-apply design guidance for the unique challenge of creating touch- and gesture-based user interfaces

*Considers diverse user needs and context, real world successes and failures, and a look into the future of NUI

*Presents thirty scenarios, giving practitioners a multitude of considerations for making informed design decisions and helping to ensure that missteps are never made again

Is your application or Web site ready for prime time?

A major revision of a classic reference, GUI Bloopers 2.0 looks at user interface design bloopers from commercial software, Web sites, Web applications, and information appliances, explaining how intelligent, well-intentioned professionals make these mistakes--and how you can avoid them. While equipping you with the minimum of theory, GUI expert Jeff Johnson presents the reality of interface design in an entertaining, anecdotal, and instructive way.

* Updated to reflect the bloopers that are common today, incorporating many comments and suggestions from first edition readers.

* Takes a learn-by-example approach that teaches how to avoid common errors.

* Covers bloopers in a wide range of categories: GUI controls, graphic design and layout, text messages, interaction strategies, Web site design -- including search, link, and navigation, responsiveness issues, and management decision-making.

* Organized and formatted so information needed is quickly found, the new edition features call-outs for the examples and informative captions to enhance quick knowledge building.

* Hundreds of illustrations: both the DOs and the DON'Ts for each topic covered, with checklists and additional bloopers on www.gui-bloopers.com.

Most programmers' fear of user interface (UI) programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphic design—the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-black-wearing people produce cool-looking, artistic pieces. Most programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers instead—strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment, and incapable of doing UI design.

In this brilliantly readable book, author Joel Spolsky proposes simple, logical rules that can be applied without any artistic talent to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to websites to consumer electronics. Spolsky's primary axiom, the importance of bringing the program model in line with the user model, is both rational and simple.

In a fun and entertaining way, Spolky makes user interface design easy for programmers to grasp. After reading User Interface Design for Programmers, you'll know how to design interfaces with the user in mind. You'll learn the important principles that underlie all good UI design, and you'll learn how to perform usability testing that works.