Introducing the Android UI Utilities project (beta)
About a month ago, I tweeted a link to a teaser video that showed off an Android icon generation tool I was building. The goal of the tool was to simplify Android icon creation for developers that don’t have access to design resources.
Today, I’m happy to make this and a few other tools available as part of the new Android UI Utilities open source project. Included are the Android Asset Studio, a set of Android UI prototyping stencils for the very awesome Pencil GUI prototyping software, and some Photoshop icon templates.
You can read more about the project and the currently available tools at the project site on Google Code. Here’s a demo video showing what kind of prototyping and asset generation you can now do:
And here’s a quick screenshot of the currently available UI prototyping stencils:
Now, I’ll warn that the tools are very much in beta, so they may not yet be ready for prime-time. I’m relying on you, Android developers, to test out these tools and file bugs and feature requests.
Other tools such as XML and 9-patch generators, as well as more stencils, are planned. If you’ve got ideas on what to add, you can let me know in the comments, file a feature request, or even contribute some code. I’m looking forward to expanding this project in the future to help make UI design on Android easier!
