To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.

SmashingMagazine prepared an overview of useful web and mobile user interface kits, handy PDFs and resources that we can use in our projects. They’ve carefully selected the most useful kits and resources to get you going in the early stages of a project. Enjoy!

The usability guru Dr Jakob Nielsen just published a free 93-page report on iPad usability. In his report he
critiques the most important iPad’s usability failings and points out how Apple should allow more diversity on its platforms including the option for Adobe Flash.

“For once, I’m on the side of Flash,” he says, “because I think Apple is trying to over-rigidly control what’s on its devices. I can understand there are benefits to doing that, but there are also benefits to the diversity of the internet. Diversity is a very powerful mechanism. In the early days of the web, there were many alternatives that were closed services – AOL, CompuServe, Trilogy – but on the web, anybody could put up anything, including a lot of bad stuff. But users vote with their feet, or their clicks: they can click away from bad Flash and click towards good Flash. It’s a shame Apple is so restrictive on what they allow on the iPad and the iPhone. When a customer has bought a device, it’s theirs; they should be able to see the information they want, and run the applications they want.”

Completely agree with him! Read the full article from guardian.co.uk.

People at teehanlax.com published a lot of useful mobile design resources on their blog in the past, but I found this great Palm Pre GUI PSD template only today. You can find a list of available design resources from teehanlax here. Enjoy!

The Wired iPad application just went live on the AppStore. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. A great example about how to improve user experience depending on the media we’re using. Take a look at the video above or read more from Wired.

As many of you know Nokia is focused on emergin technologies and news, there is a project inside the research web site of Nokia related to the augmented reality that looks to me very interesting.

The Mobile Augmented Reality Applications project (MARA) explores utilizing camera equipped mobile devices as platforms for sensor-based, video see-through mobile augmented reality. The project also investigates new and exciting applications enabled by this technology, and UI solutions and paradigms motivated by the restrictions of the mobile devices.

You can get all the info about hardware, demos, and how it works from this page.

Forum Nokia just released and useful AIR tool for mobile prototyping: Flowella.

Flowella is an easy to use tool that enables designers and developers to create design prototypes — without writing a line of code. Prototypes are built using images of screen mock-ups and defining links between the screens. This information is then used to create an Adobe Flash Lite 3.0 application or Web Runtime (WRT) widget. These applications can then be run on one of over seventy Nokia devices or in a simulator supplied with Flowella, enabling the application interaction to be assessed.

(via Vivek) – Designers at Punchcut prepared this video to illustrate the thinking about touch UI design. Designing for touch-based mobile user interfaces requires new thinking and an expanded design vocabulary. Punchcut Perspective: Considerations for Designing Touch UI from Punchcut on Vimeo.