Mer UI: Scalability

Hello everyone.

Today I’m not gonna show you new calculator faceplates (surprise!). Today I’ll show you the evolution of Mer UI design, that was inspired by Mer’s scalability.

Though Mer is targeted mostly to portable touchscreen platforms, such as MIDs, Pocket PCs and NITs, it still can be installed on variety of devices, including beagleboard and different notebooks. So we should make the UI that can look and act smooth on all types of screens from tiny PDA’s to large notebooks or even desktops.

So lets look how improved UI will work with portrait VGA screen (such as LOOX 720 or OpenMoko Freerunner).

Here’s the homescreen.

As you can see, portrait screen is not so good for our multifunctional bar, so we have to override the limitations without usability affection. So what we have now is 8 slots for statusbar and running application icons. If we’ll place some basic statusbar applets, such as time, battery and signal, we will have 2 slots for apps and 1 for notifications. Sounds nice, cause now we still can switch between IM, for example, and browser or book reader with one tap. But should user always go to the large task manager to see all other applications? Nope.

Welcome to the new Mer menu.

So, on the top of the Mer menu you can see scalable Tasks row, that helds all running applicatons. It acts pretty much as the desktop one. Here’s the example of different number of applications launched:

But that’s not all. “Tasks” is the button itself and it shows detailed application switcher:

Also current menu has a grid arrangement that helps to utilize space wisely and allows to make scalable menu, that will work fine on different devices with different screen sizes and resolutions.

Feel free to post your suggestions and request cause Mer is first of all Community project and everyone can participate!

Thank you.