1. The Magic Fridge

You definitely know the dissapointing feeling of checking your fridge planning to cook your lunch after a late going out on Saturday and finding one onion left. Even the most skillful chef would probably get puzzled by the profound emptiness of the fridge.

Groceries, the first shopping app by MasterCard integrated directly into the Samsung refrigerator will save your day.

What can be more useful and practical than order your food directly from your fridge? Besides, the app will be able to personalize your shopping experience according to your habits and make the shopping lists for you. Some future customers already asked for the option to automatically detect lack of food items and notify the consumer about it.

2. Your pet’s friend

LG Rolling Bot — a new pet’s friend, a device that will entertain your pet while you are not at home. It has an integrated camera and thanks to its shape it easily rolls from one room to another. The ball is controlled by the app no matter where you are. You can also talk to your pet as the robotic ball has a microphone and a speaker. Apart from being useful, the design is cool enough!

3. Mate Book

Mate book — a new Huawei tablet suitable not only for business purposes but can be a good mate for designers and artists. With its MatePen you can experience its extra pressure sensitivity (2,048 levels!!!)

4. Smart pet products

Smart pet products — one of the competitors of the Rolling bot, is a set of pet-oriented devices and apps. Ball Ready device trains your pet by throwing the ball and gives it food as a reward. Then with a Petfit app you can check how many calories your pet burns (and how fit it is!)

5. Wanda Robot

I have no idea whether this robot’s name is Wanda or it means something else in chinese, but his owner pronounced this word every time another action was expected to be demonstrated. And Wanda did it every time without objection and seemed friendly. Wanda danced, Wanda sang songs, Wanda even took a picture of mine. And Wanda talked a lot, but only Chinese…

Looking forward to the next MWC!

If you are reading this article you still wonder how to deal with the mysterious “dp” (density-independent pixel).

Around 3 years ago I started designing for Android and at once the unknown world of xxhdpi, dp, sp opened the doors to me. It was hard to understand the usage of device-independent pixels, scaleable pixels, as well as concepts like pixel density. So I surfed dozens of articles and developers’ blogs to understand what it was all about. But when it came to preparing assets for developers it was another drama of rescaling, saving & naming each slice.

As the UI design role & mobile industry grows too fast, today we have a huge amount of tools with one-click-solve-problem options to put at ease the designer’s life.

One of these days I was trying to explain the “dp basics”, the design process & working with developers to an Android UI novice, so I share the summing-up with you.

Android densities

There are a lot of Android devices with different sizes and proportions and each screen has its density.

The set of Android screen densities is:

• ldpi (low) ~120dpi
• mdpi (medium) ~160dpi
• hdpi (high) ~240dpi
• xhdpi (extra-high) ~320dpi
• xxhdpi (extra-extra-high) ~480dpi
• xxxhdpi (extra-extra-extra-high) ~640dpi

Looks scary, right?

No worries, if you design for mobile, forget about ldpi (this kind of low-density devices are in danger of extinction).

What is dpi?

DPI is a density-independent pixel. Thanks to dp the UI elements look uniform on screens with different densities.

1 dp equals 1px in 160dpi screen (MDPI screen). More density the screen has, more pixels it has. Android Developers Page gives all the profound analysis on the topic.

How to design in dp?

You shouldn’t really design in dp, you should design in pixels having dp in mind.

Each density screen has its equivavelnt in pixels, so just choose the density you want to design for and set the pixel equivalent artboard.

Everybody loves Sketch

Since Sketch app appeared, the UI design process became more intuitive, efficient & fun!

If you decided to try yourself as a UI designer but previuosly worked with Adobe Creative Suite, don’t be scared to try SketchApp. You’ll be surprised how clear the things are over there & how fast you’ll feel comfortable using it.

Android Sketch resources

There is nothing better for you as a novice in Android as using the existing templates to analyse the UI structure.

The official Material Design page provides you with a set of resources — from colour palettes to layout templates.

You can also find some useful templates on Sketchappsources.

Some templates offer you the MDPI layout (360x480px), others XHDPI (720x1280px).

Zeplin makes final Magic

3 years ago I had to make all the assets and specs manually. Then Sketch appeared & made it easier. But the real dessert is Zeplin. It generates resources, color palettes and styleguides in 1 click.

No matter what density screen you are using for your design. When exporting artboard to Zeplin, you just have to choose the density you use and Zeplin generates resources for all screens.

Hope it was useful for you. Thank’s for reading!