Integrating Mobile Design Patterns within a User Interface Development Environment

One of the main factors behind the rapid development and wide adoption of modern mobile devices is surely the enormous amount of third party applications available for the various mobile platforms. Nevertheless, due to the unique characteristics of the mobile world, designing usable user interfaces for such applications is still a challenging task. Design patterns were conceived to deal with design complexity providing well-recognized and reusable solutions. However, one of the main difficulties arising when design patterns are used by less experienced users, is the choice of the appropriate patterns for a specific problem. To support novice developers in that choice, we propose MIDE, a tool that devises patterns in the form of ready to use application templates and interface snippets