Addressing the Stylus-Driven UI

Given the fact that touchscreens have become nothing but the “in” thing to do, it seems like most every innovation with the Internet Tablet focuses on making it finger-friendly. Now, there’s nothing wrong with it, and personally I prefer it. But, what would happen if we addressed the UI from a perspective of being optimized for use with a stylus?

Navigation

As much as sometimes we don’t want to admit it, using the stylus is sometimes the most effective way to navigate around the tablet. Here are a few recommendations for making the stylus more effective:

• Making actions such as tap and hold more evident on things like text, icons, and when items are highlighted by showing a star or some kind of indicator that there are some additional functions
• When scrolling web pages and long documents (PDFs, etc.) with the stylus, show trails that accelerate or decelerate scrolling speed as well as FF/RW buttons to do a quick page up/down action on the page
• In applications that feature forward and back, allow for gesture actions with the stylus to go forward and backward (essential in full-screen mode)

If you will, the point here is keeping the stylus in your hand, and a part of the interaction of the tablet that finger-friendly UIs expose.

Writing

I want to break this up into two subsections, handwriting and keyboard.

Handwriting

• In terms of handwriting we can look at having a transparent writing pad appear over writable sections (when the focus cursor is activated for those items)
• Improve the sensitivity of the handwriting engine so that letters that are written together can be easily trained and recognized (maybe some type of AI can be added here)

Virtual Keyboard

• Allow for users to not have to lift the stylus, but at every “stop” and “direction change” the letter is recognized.
• Change the location of the word compted words to the top of the virtual keyboard, keeping the space bar free from being possibly taken up by too long a list of words
• Transparency could be nice here too

Thinking About Different Needs

I know that we normally want to think about things in a way that seems comfortable to us, but the truth of designing a user interface is that you are making something that is comfortable to be learned for someone else. Fingers are great, and painting with them can really amount to some neat artwork. But for those that like to use a brush, attention has to be paid to them too, because some really nice masterpieces can be made when we make sure that the canvas, paints, and brushes have been made with them in mind too.

It’s alive! [Statusbar clock release]

Hello everyone.

Today I want to proudly present you the first application, that was inspired by this blog:

Andrew Olmsted’s Statusbar Clock

I think that I don’t need to explain what it does. The main great idea of Andrew is to use two applets for more visibility of digits and it works pretty solid!

I’m sure that this is just the beginning and many other ideas of community will inspire developers to make them real. Thank you very much, Andrew and thanks all for reading this blog. Keep it up!

Tablet Heart (Web Browser): Part I

Hello.

When you hear the word “Internet” or “Web” you don’t imagine instant messengers or some kind of administration tools or anything else. Your first thought are zillions of sites, that carries zetabytes of information, that is given to you in different ways like text, pictures, animation, flash, music, video and so on. So, if the device is called Internet Tablet — that means that it is profiled to give you easy and handy access to the maximum amount of internet resources. So the heart of that device should o be web browser. We gonna look at Internet Tablet browser and it’s UI closely in this article. Fire your engines!

To begin with I’d proudly like to say that OS2008 Internet Tablet’s web-browser called MicroB (also you can install it as additional engine in OS2007) is one of the best portable experiences of web browsing at all. It totally kicks Windows Mobile “Opera Mobile” and other competitors and easily competes with iPhone’s Safari that is “revolutionary extremely great new awesome and blah-blah” ;-) And it beats UMPC’s (to be fair, to that moment) because of battery life. It handles most of the sites without any render problems or crashes (actually, I haven’t seen such site :-). This is really really great and it approves the name of Internet tablet for 100%.

But nothing is ideal for 100% so after long time of everyday using MicroB I have come to some UI improvements that will help user to access most of the functions easy and quick.

First of all let’s see how it looks and behaves right now:

a General Rant on UI Design

For handheld computers, there are basically two UI design patterns. The first one, the keyboard UI, has been almost invented and immediately perfected by Psion in their Series 3xx palmtop computer line. It really would take far too long to explain how the Psion UI works (although, as a longtime Psion afficionado, I’m sorely tempted!) but let’s suffice by saying that the keyboard-based user interface of those computers was simple, intuitive (as far as any computer metaphore can be intuitive),easy to learn and as frugal as possible. That last property means that the interface was designed in such a way that any user action could be performed with as little input as possible (I’d almost dare to claim that Psion managed to find the path with the least possible inputs for everything — I sure like to see proof of the opposite).