New Year Countdown Series: #3 and #4

It’s Christmas Eve, everybody making last preparations for great holiday, and I have 2 improvements for today! Why not only one? You’ll see it after the break.

New Year Countdown Series: #2

And as I promissed – second Fremantle wannabe UI improvement!

New Year Countdown Series: #1

Hello there.

It’s been a long time since we’ve met last time, and many things happened. But I think most of themes were already discussed in many blogs and forums, so it’s not necessary to mention them here. What I want to do now is to conclude this very productive year with a series of 10 posts that will describe 10 UI innovations that I dream to see in upcoming Maemo 5 or so called Fremantle. Some of them are pretty fresh and outstanding, some of them you maybe have already seen before. So let’s begin our New Year Countdown!

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Lets Talk!

Hello everyone.

Today I want to make a very small post. it will not be about UI or design. It will be about community. Maybe you heard about Maemo.org logo contest (it’s coming to the deadline soon so post your submissions!) and i’ve submited some logos too. i’ve put very much sense in each, to make maemo.org community deeper and even more sophisticated. One of the ideas is discussion between community members. This is great process that is very attractive for all developers and users, because together they can acheive great goals and create fabulous products. I’ve made this blog not only for posting interesting UI ideas but generaly for discussion! Your opinion is very important for me and for all of us. Please, feel free to express your thoughts about anything you see here. I’ve disabled “registred only” posting so everyone is extremely welcome to express yourself.

Thanks for reading.

OMWeather 0.2 release

Hello.

First of all, I’m very sorry for such a long pause in posting in this blog – I had a lot of work to do. But there are some great news: I’ve participated in two projects. And I want to tell you about one of them today :)

It’s new release of one of the most useful software on NIT — Other Maemo Weather. And I’m very proud to work with such a great talented team. So, let me introduce OMWeather v.0.20 :)I was asked to make new default iconset, instead of”Crystal”. There were some copyright problems so to avoid them OMWeather dev’s decided to replace it and I happily agreed to help them. So I’ve made “Glance” iconset. Hope you’ll like it. other great new features of OMWeather 0.20 — after the break ;)

OMWeather «Contour» iconset.

Hello.

Today I want to introduce you my iconset for OMWeather called «Contour»

The main feature of this set is that it looks very familiar with Maemo OS’08 interface. And also it’s 100% readable both on bright and dark backgrounds.

Feel free to post your comments and suggestions here :)

Right now you can download it here but soon it will be available right in your Application Manager.

Want to give many thanks to Vlad Vasiliev for rapid helping me in assembling .deb file :)

Stay tuned.

P.S.: And happy first day of spring :)

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:

Chapter II: the Tray Strikes Back.

Hello.
As I’ve said before, tray is a best way for gathering required info about the device and software status like battery charge, wi-fi connection and instant messaging status. But right now in Maemo it holds not so much info, that it could and even this info is mixed with “thrash” like application title. In the first chapter of this blog we’ve done some work on the applet amount aspect of tray, cleared it from thrash information and finished with brand new wide redesigned tray. Now let’s work on quality aspect.

Chapter I: the Tray.

Tray is a great feature of Maemo. It really helps you to access all “everysecond” info like battery and connection status, volume and brightness control and some others, instead of digging deep the control panel. Also third-party software can place it’s status icon to the tray, that will help you to interact in some way. For example, Pidgin adds it’s account status to the tray and you can easily access Buddy list by simply clicking on it. On the home screen, tray looks very slick and tasty.