The UI Updates

So first things first… we have a new app icon… and we’re really pleased with it.

The new Asssist Icon

The icon, as we hope you can see, is a mash up of the Android logo (or his head at least) and the Dribbble basketball.

We have also made most of the buttons in the app have more of a ‘buttony’ look. We hope this make the app more usable to new comers.

As well as this we have changed the way we scale and crop shots when displaying them. We had noticed that sometimes the borders we provided were leaving some extra whitespace around the images so we’ve tried to fix this too.

The Extra Features

There 2 real additional features in this release… each of which we hope will delight you!

First up is the option to add your Dribbble ID in the settings… this then enables 2 extra options in the “View” menu which let you see shots that you’ve liked and also those of the people that you are following.

The second additional feature is the usage of the hardware volume buttons to navigate the shot gallery. This should make one hand use on larger devices such as the HTC Desire HD much easier.

Asssist now supports comments

One of the key features of this release is the ability to now see the comments made by other Dribbblers, something which indeed adds an extra insight into the brilliant minds which hang out there. The comments appear under the shot image which remains on screen so you can refer back to the image when reading the comments. Of course you can also click on the name of whoever left the comment and see their shot list too.

Other changes in this release include;

• Increasd list size (doubled to 30 shots per list)
• Improved experience when navigating between lists.
• Various bug fixes (please still report any issues you may have)

Enjoy!

Asssist on an HTC Wildfire

Key changes are:

• Now listing in market for devices with smaller/lower density screens
• Better UI across devices of varying display capabilities
• Added an intelligent history giving better and faster app navigation
• Further improvements to the cache so that navigation speeds increase (and your data usage and bills decrease).
• Huge reduction in overall application size (almost half)
• Addition of linked rebound count on main screen
• Various bug fixes including mending the “reload” which should now work

Asssist running on HTC Legend

Although we’ve marked this up as a minor update the resulting experience for the users should be much improved. Firstly the speed of the application has been improved by locally caching the shot lists from Dribbble. This is ideal for users who skip between the different Dribbble lists such as popular and debuts. This also benefits those who view the shots by a particular Dribbble user. This change also has the knock on affect of also reducing data downloads… something else we’re sure you’ll be pleased with.

The only real core feature added in this release is the ability to view shots at nigh-on full screen simply by tapping the shot in question (which is actually Dribbble’s teaser of the shot. This is a great way to see an optimal view of the design on your Android device. We’ve implemented this in a “two stage” fashion giving the end user a fast view which then updates once the full version of the image has been downloaded (we’re particularly chuffed with this).

The 1.1.1 version of Asssist can be downloaded from the Android Market or use the QR code on the Asssist download page.

So following our initial release we had some quite scathing comments on the the look and feel of our app. Correcting this became one of the key things we had to put straight in our next release.

These were comments were understandable (and fairly spot on) in our opinion since we really wanted to be first to market with a Dribbble application for Android… and as such no hard feelings were taken. We also new that if we were building an app for designers then serving them up something which looked like dog food wouldn’t go down well for long (if at all in some cases).

Then along came Chris Dalonz and John Rowley. These 2 Dribbble community members both of who provided feedback in our initial beta phase also came up with some design ideas which were head and shoulders above what we have in the beta (or even the 1.0.1 release).

It was this “kick up the ass” from these guys (and specifically inspiration from John’s proposals) which made us review our colour-scheme and overall UI. The original colour scheme was going to be based around basketball court flooring but this seemed to pale in comparison of the type of thing John had suggested. So going back to the drawing board and taking the Dribbble colours as a starter we came up with our new palette.

We all our UI components through this and then added some subtle depth through gradients and shadow and we come to where we are now.

We also decided to stick with our approach of using Android’s gallery widget for displaying the shots… this seems to be the slickest way of getting the shots as big as possible and retaining that “inherent app” feel that comes across when swiping your finger across a touch screen.

There were some other minor UI fixes too such as use of icons in the menu and better menu title handling… Of course we still think the UI and deisgn can be improved upon but we also had features to build… oh yeah the features!

The Features

So what did we add:

• Shot sharing – a common utility across many apps… one that was certainly needed for anything to do with communities.
• Visibility of Views, Comments and Likes – handy for seeing how debuts are fairing and exactly how may folk love the top shots
• Rebounds – as well as a count you can also view a shot’s rebounds.
• Date of shot
• Link through to the user’s Dribbble profile on Dribbble.com
• Link through to the user’s twitter profile (if they have one).

All in all we hope you like the direction we’re going… we certainly do.

As well as Asssist other great things listed there include:

1. Liiikes – A great way to see who’s who in the MVP world of Dribbble
2. Incominggg – A safari extension to see activity notifications
3. HalfCourtShot – A neat little JS script for grabbing shots

If you want to stay up to speed with what others are doing with the Dribbble API then be sure to add Rebbbounds to your RSS subscriptions.

The client has been released in open beta for users to comment on and leave feedback as to how users want the application to develop.

The first drop has been published with minimal effort being placed on design of the client as the drive to get as many features into the first drop was high. This design shall be reviewed in later releases.

Asssist uses the Dribbble API to interact with the high profile design show and tell site.

The client can be downloaded from the official Android Market from Google