plasma-mid (Mobile Internet Device)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday 25 August 2008, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Monday 25 August 2008, Artur Souza (MoRpHeUz) wrote:
> > Hey!
> >
> > 2008/8/24 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>:
> > > 5. create artwork for all this specific to the devices
> > > 6. research!
> >
> >   Just my 2 cents: our experience with n810 shows that end users tend
> > to like interfaces "thumb-friendly", so it would be great If we could
> > imagine an UI that the user could use mainly with his thumbs and just
> > use stylus for minor interactions.
>
> absolutely.
>
> when we were discussing the idea of "launching applications", which is the
> primary UI (PUI) for these things we decided on a side list because we can
> make nice big targets and a big krunner-like buttons that are easily
> "thumbed" as you note.
>
> we specifically did not want a pull out menu in this case with a desktop
> showing because it's much harder to create an easily thumb/fingerable
> system in a menu unless you make that menu really big (e.g. take up the
> whole screen =)

so.. writing emails before 09:00 on a stressful Monday before coffee == really 
confusing verbage. let me try again:

we decided that we wanted to have the application launcher as the main UI when 
you turn on the device. a bit more phone or iPodish, perhaps, but that's 
really what people want to do when they power these things on.

the current draft design looks like this: the launcher will be split into two 
sections. a list on the left showing categories, which will including things 
like favourites, dashboard (for a summary-page-like widget layout area) and 
then actual task categories (Internet, Games, etc). this list must be flip-
scrollable and have decent size targets.

on the right will be a grid of icons, one for each action in the category 
(exception: the widget dashboard, which will change the containment from the 
app launcher to a free widget layout)

these icons will be big, shiny and happy. i'd also like to offer a hover based 
interface for them, so you can press, hold briefly, move, release and trigger a 
non-launch action (such as colour in the "mark as favourite" star, or maybe 
things like "hide entry"?)

this isn't written in stone of course and we're open to other ideas.

for instance, we could have the favourites/most often used apps on the main 
screen laid out with nice big icons and then have a "more apps" option that 
brings you to a layout showing the categories in nice big buttons, and 
clicking on one of those would then take you to a screen showing all the 
entries in it. the downside of this is that there would be a lot more back and 
forth navigation to find things, but maybe that's not a big deal on these kinds 
of devices.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech

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