Making best use of real estate on Tablets and Phones

[barrymavin]

Tablets and Phones have less real estate that what is available in Desktop and Web Browser Apps.

When building an App for Phones that use the "Navigation Panel" (Recommended best practice) the Navigation Panel is rendered only as icons.

If you want to utilize UI space on a tablet you can tell Lianja to generate the HTML5 Tablet Client using a "Mini Navigation Panel" in v1.1.



With a full size Navigation Panel our HTML5 Tablet Client will look like this.



And with a "Mini Navigation Panel" it looks like this on a Tablet. Note that phones always use the "Mini" layout.



One of the nice things about using "Navigation Panels" is that all of the pages and sections that make up your App are all loaded but not visible and all have their data kept current in the background even though you can't see them. Look at the "Lianja Tablet UI Demo" included in the distribution and you will see what can be done with minimum coding.

As the Lianja mantra states "Think before coding". "Think" about how you want the App to look, lay it all out, create a navigation panel to hide/show the UI elements of your App, then when that's to your satisfaction if you need any special delegates to handle custom actions add them in following that.

Lianja Apps are known an Single Page Applications (SPA) and these are one of the basic building blocks of Lianja in conjunction with the Lianja Object Model (LOM) so that all UI elements can be referenced from delegates in a consistent manner no matter what scripting language you use.

Full details of the Lianja HTML5 Client API can be found here.

Enjoy.

[hmischel@diligentsystems.com]

Clever.

[hmischel@diligentsystems.com]

Hi Barry,

It is common to have the navigation of a phone app on the bottom (or top), and not usually on the side.
If I have phone app that follows the IOS Human Interface guideline,

https://developer.apple.com/library/...avigation.html

And I would like to continue to give the user that same look and feel as I move to Lianja, would that be difficult?

Thanks.

Herb

[HankFay]

Hi Barry,

It is common to have the navigation of a phone app on the bottom (or top), and not usually on the side.
If I have phone app that follows the IOS Human Interface guideline,

https://developer.apple.com/library/...avigation.html

And I would like to continue to give the user that same look and feel as I move to Lianja, would that be difficult?

Thanks.

Herb

Similarly for Android, with 3 bars on the bottom left signaling that there is a menu that can pop out.

thanks,

Hank

[barrymavin]

Lianja apps are not simple and these are database apps so they need a way to navigate data. They have a great deal of functionality built in and the pages are laid out to be consistent across all devices. As an example the twitter app has a navigation panel on the left and Facebook uses the pages menu which is an alternate navigation style. Lianja supports three navigation styles.

1. Navigation menu
2. Pages menu
3. Custom navigation

[barrymavin]

Nearly every app I use on both iOS and android uses a nav panel and/or pages menu -- apart for games that I don't use.

Even the iOS settings page uses a navigation panel on the left.