Ice Cream Sandwich | Techie Talkz

15AUG2012: Android ICS/JB Photoshop GUI Design Kit is updated to 3.0 and released at AndroidUIUX!

29FEB2012: Android Team have officially provided the Android Design Stencils in Adobe Photoshop format! Awesome!

26FEB2012: Android ICS GUI Design Kits updated to 2.0.1!

19JAN2012: Android ICS GUI Design Kits updated to 2.0!

Update

1.1: Added more stock ICS GUI elements. Refer below for details.

2.0: Based on the official Android Design by Android Team, most of the ICS GUI stock elements have been added. Below image shows a summary of the content.

2.0.1: Added the Back Arrow for the top action bar. Thanks Andy!

Details

I have been designing mock up of Android app in Adobe Photoshop and I find that a GUI Design Kit is extremely important, and I thought there isn’t any good (and simple) one in the wild, so I have decided to make this Android ICS GUI Design Kit for two different resolutions and dpi:

720×1280 320dpi – Samsung Galaxy Nexus
480×800 240 dpi – Samsung Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S II

The main idea of this GUI Design Kit is not making everything scalable to the unfortunate fragmentation occurs in Android, but just provide some stock elements of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) in one .psd file so app designer can really focus on creating awesome mock up to show developers/clients. Some of the elements are just single layer of image from ICS, but I thought they are pretty adequate for mock up purpose.

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The announcement of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) and the new Galaxy Nexus certainly are exciting news for Android supporter, though it is a little bit sad to know that Nexus One won’t get the sweetness that Ice Cream Sandwich offers (at least officially).

There has been a promise of Nexus S getting Ice Cream Sandwich few weeks after the release of Galaxy Nexus, however, I am sure most of the Nexus S (and other Android device that is eligible for the update) user couldn’t wait any longer for the release. Good news is that Google already released the SDK of Android 4.0, so while waiting for the official release, we can have a go on the sweetness via the emulator on the computer.

How about a real ROM on the device now? If you are adventurous enough to try an unstable ROM (and by unstable, I really meant it) which is not meant for daily normal usage – you got it. Drew Garen from drewgaren.com has put in some efforts to convert the available SDK into a working ROM for Nexus S and it is working surprisingly well (not entirely stable but it is surprise to see this stability from a ROM built from an SDK).

If you are interested and ready to take some risk, you can refer to the guide here on how to get it install (even if you haven’t root your Nexus S), however, if you would like to see what’s new and how does it run on Nexus S, keep reading. Continue reading [Android] First Impression of unofficial Ice Cream Sandwich on Google Nexus S →