Most of this book has been concerned with developing code, with some design topics added in. That isn’t due to a lack of design sophistication in the platform or any limit to the opportunity to design beautiful, effective applications, but is mostly a matter of focus.
This chapter is all about styling your applications, a broad design topic. You will learn advanced type-styling techniques, with additional background on the use of type and text within your applications. Images will be deconstructed so that you can learn how to position and size them within a scene’s layout, and integrate them with other content. A well-designed application will integrate touches and gestures reliably; you’ll learn how to optimize your application to handle touches elegantly within your visual design.
This is just a very small sample of the range of the design capabilities of webOS and the opportunities it presents. There are extensive resources available to learn more about styling or various visual and interaction design topics included in the SDK:
- Human Interface guidelines
The SDK includes an extended set of guidelines for application designers on everything from designing a great webOS application to technical guidelines for graphic designers.
- Palm webOS Visual Style Guide
A thorough review of the webOS design philosophy and how to design visual elements for your applications.
- Style Matters
An interactive sample application available in the SDK for learning and applying styles on webOS.
In addition, there is the Quick Reference Style Guide (included as Appendix C in this book). This guide will give you more detail on the topics in this chapter as well as additional styling information.