Richard Venneman

I'm a 22 years old developer and UI designer from The Netherlands. This is where I share my experiences with mobile and web apps.

Android GUI PSD (High-Density)

It came to my attention that teehan+lax, the team behind the excellent iPhone GUI PSD did an Android GUI PSD too. This PSD contains all Android interface elements so you can use them in your Photoshop mockups. Check out their downloads page too, sweet!

Content-Aware Fill watermarks

Just discovered a great use for Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill function: hiding watermarks in stock images!

For a design I’m working on I needed a soil background. I was planning on just trying different ones but I didn’t want to buy them all. E.g. this photo on Dreamstime has this big Dreamstime logo in the center. Content-Aware Fill-ing this section hid the watermark perfectly. This way I could easily try several images in my comp before buying a larger size.

Photoshop New Doc iOS & Android presets

Photoshop gives you the ability to create custom “New Document” presets. These come in quite handy when you’re designing for multiple (mobile) screen resolutions. From the “New Document” dialog you can create and delete presets, but for some reason there are no edit or export options. Fortunately we can add and edit these presets by editing a specific TXT file.

The default New Document presets get stored in a file called Default New Doc Sizes.txt located in Applications/Adobe Photoshop CS5/Locales/en_US/Support Files. If you’re on Windows it should be in /Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop CS5/Required/. You can edit this file to your likings, by adding new presets and deleting any unneeded presets. Below are the presets I use for Mobile (iOS and Android) design. You can add them between “Standard screen sizes” and “Generic mobile device sizes”, somewhere around line 189:

These values are taken directly from the iOS HIG and the Android Developers Guide. Note that these lines include the correct resolutions (pixels/inch) which could come in handy if you’re going to print your designs. Also, Color Profile: “Don’t Color Manage this Document”. Read Setting Up Photoshop For Web, App and iPhone Development on Smashing Magazine for more information on that subject.
The presets are currently subsets of the “Mobile & Devices” section. Unfortunately due to localization restrictions, it seems you cannot create your own sections. Hope it is of some help anyways!