We’re very pleased to bring you the new DroidUX, coming with lots of exciting changes, new addition to the Android UI components library, new product offerings, updated website and members portal with fresh and streamlined user interface to make it even easier for you to take full advantage of all the resources offered.
We’ve been working hard to always improve and provide the best products and services for the maximum benefits of our members and fellow Android developers We believe and surely hope that these new changes shall deliver a new level of service that increase the satisfaction of our current and future clients, members, and even for the occasional visitors.
Streamlining Our Website
If you’ve been here before, we believe you’ll now find our website fresher and more streamlined. With cleaner and easier-to-use user interface, you’ll find it more enjoyable to make use of the resources available here. But it’s not only you, as visitors and members, who are benefiting from the new system that we’ve now put in place. By having a better system at the back-end, our team are also having a blast because of the easier and more enjoyable time it will be for us to create more and better contents.
In the past we’ve had two separate systems for our company website and customer portal. With the new system, we’ve integrated the two websites and completely overhauled the membership system, avoiding any confusions when our members need to access resources which they’re entitled to. If you’re currently a member, you’ll definitely appreciate the new system, which make it easy for you to access your purchased products and services, such as downloading the library and templates, asking for support, and other premium resources.
We’re currently still in the process of migrating the contents from our old system. As the time goes by, we’ll continue to grow and add interesting and useful contents for your benefits.
The Rewriting of DroidUX Library
One of the major change in the new DroidUX, is the rewriting of our Android UI components library. With the growth and maturity of the Android platform, we felt the need to rethink, re-architect and rewrite our solutions to take advantage of the new possibilities that are now available to us that were not there when we started developing our library almost 3 years ago.
Our main goals in rewriting the libraries are to achieve better modularization, boost performance, optimize memory utilization, and smaller library footprint. Some of the steps we’ve taken in order to achieve these goals are:
- reducing and eliminating as much as possible our internal hacks and reflection calls that might have slowed down the performance
- improving our internal bitmap caching for better memory usage
- better resource management to improve both memory and disk footprint of the final app
- better support for the graphical layout editor (“edit” mode)
- better modularization by separating the closely related components and its resources into smaller modules
- etc.
One of the consequence of this re-architecting of the library, is that the latest release, i.e. version 3.0, is not backward compatible with the previous versions, due to the foundational nature of the redesign. Therefore, we recommend that for new projects you should always use the latest version, and when possible update your projects that use older version of the library to the new version. However, when it’s not possible to update your projects with the new version of DroidUX library, you can always use the older version (version 2.x) with the new one side-by-side.
The other benefit as a result of these changes is that, it makes it easier for us to add new controls, improve existing ones, fix bugs, etc. This in turn will benefit you further by giving you more and better components as part of your UI toolkit.
Exclusive High Quality App Templates
This is the one that excite our team the most. As part of the new DroidUX, we’re now offering our members an exclusive collection of high quality Android app templates.
The app templates are designed to be flexible and easy to customize to meet your or your clients’ specific needs. They are coded following the best practices, design patterns, and standard guidelines to give you a solid foundation to build upon for your unique apps. Created using DroidUX high quality components, you’ll feel at ease developing apps based on the templates, knowing that you’ll get amazing results.
These exclusive-for-members-only templates, not only will save you $1000’s of your hard-earned dollars and hundreds of development hours, but can potentially bring you new stream of revenues by adding and improving your own portfolio of apps, or by helping you to creating apps for your current and future clients.
As part of the new DroidUX introduction, we’ve released our first template, the “LaCompagnie“. It’s a beautifully designed and highly customizable app template, perfect for introducing, marketing, and promoting your business profile, products and services, team, and any other information you want to make easily accessible to your clients or general public. If you’re a member, you can download the template in the member area.
Easy-to-choose Membership Plans
In the past we’ve tried to meet the needs of as many people as possible, by offering a range of product offerings. It turned out not as effective as we’d hoped for. In addition to creating a bit of confusion to our potential customers, it also creates a maintenance problems for us costing us time that we’d better use to innovate and create more components for the benefit of our members and community.
Therefore, we’re now offering just a couple of very simple, direct and easy-to-choose membership plans. There are only two plans to choose for, the “Components” plan that gives you access to all of our UI/UX components, and the “AppDev” plan that gives you access to all of the UI components and all of the app templates. You can find more information on what’s included in each plan, in the “Plans & Pricing” page of our website.
Conclusions
There are more changes to DroidUX than what we can list in this blog entry. Some changes might be small that you’ll barely notice the difference, some are impacting only the back-end that our team use. However, all changes are meant to improve your experience in making use of our products and services for your maximum benefits, and to help you deliver awesome mobile experience by building apps that solve problem in an amazing, beautiful, and impressive ways.
We’re very excited about the changes we’re making, and we’re confident that these changes will results in more benefits to our clients, members, and to the community in general. So, don’t forget to tweet us, post comments below, or send us message to let us know what you think.
Happy coding !