developing game for mobile phone
Challenges of Designing for Mobile Devices
The context of this system is a mobile phone, or other limited device. There are several problems that need to be overcome when designing for limited devices, such as limited program resources, and di ering user expectations.
When interacting with a mobile phone a user will have a di erent experience and di erent requirements than when interacting with their desktop computer. Their tolerance of failure is reduced – they don’t want to re-boot their phone when in the middle of an operation or transaction. Interfaces need to be highly responsive, and tuned for the speci c functionality of the application.
Mobile devices by their very nature have a limited set of user interface functionality. The devices are highly constrained both in terms of input and output. Mobile devices normally only display one screen” at a time, with only vertical scrolling enabled. Windowing systems, prevalent on desktop computers are absent from mobile devices.
J2ME provides some levels of abstraction for creating GUI elements. A high level abstraction de nes user interface elements, but leaves the actual graphical representation and layout to the device. A developer may specify that a form must contain a text box and a button, but it is the device manufacturer that will specify how these elements look and behave. Lower level abstraction uses speci c painting techniques and canvases” to draw on the screen. Algorithms are used to adapt the painting to di erent devices. Designing with a high level of abstraction means that the program will work on a larger range of devices than with lower levels of abstraction, as all devices supporting the confguration will support the widgets – whereas you may have to design for specifc devices when drawing on canvas objects.