Continuing on the OS2008 and N810 improvements, we added a hardware keyboard on the device and tweaked our input methods to take advantage of this. Of course we are pleased if the on-screen input methods were already sufficient for some users – hey, they’re not so bad after all
Planet maemo: category "feed:f0124b2066cfa542994ea3c3da95aa1d"
Hi. Few more words about UI improvements in some applications and not forgetting additional wallpapers you can try with new OS2008
(Note to planet maemo which sees just the first chapter: The post contains wallpapers for your enjoyment! :-))
So, the new internet tablet OS is finally out of our hands. One of the most apparent changes is the transparency in the theme – the panels are now translucent and show the wallpaper through. This works nicely as you can change the appearance of the theme quite radically by just trying out different kinds of background images. The applets on the home screen also look nicer since they blend smoothly to the background. Or at least we think they look nicer than before :^)
The theme is also visually much cleaner, I tried to achieve a simple, elegant look that would go with the smoother design of the device itself. Hopefully you all like the end result – I am pretty happy with how it worked out. We also tried to improve the finger-usability some more, as with the N810, at least I find it cumbersome to keep the stylus around while I am using the keyboard to type – it’s more natural to just reach the screen with either thumb when needed. Sure, there’s still room for improvement, but I think it is already better than before.
As some of us in the user interface team are enthusiastic photographers, we decided to make a little christmas present and dug into our photo folders, looking for nice stuff to be usable as wallpapers. Hopefully you enjoy them
It was nice to meet so many old friends and new people in Guadec. We had lots of great discussions and got valuable feedback and ideas about our Maemo user interface.
We try to take a more active role in the developer community, hoping to better support application developers from UI point of view. And we are also looking forward to participate in the creation of Gnome Mobile together with the rest of the community, sharing our experiences and the lessons we have learned while developing a mobile device with a touchscreen.
Hopefully you were all present in Ari Jaaksi’s keynote speech, where he explained many of the challenges we face when creating a product to be sold in stores. It hopefully made it a bit easier to understand why it sometimes takes so long to get improvements or new ideas included into our products.
We hope to have lively dialogue with you in the future. This is of course meant for everyone, not just those of you who were in Guadec!
Jenni & Tuomas
“Beauty and the Beast”
Hello everyone. Silence means busy – and busy is of course good, in many ways. We’re busy with a lot of new stuff.
Hi. One thing that we would also like to do is to promote and review some of the best and most interesting installable applications from our Maemo users and community developers that are currently out there. Naturally there are many available (check out the Maemo site or your local Application manager app), and we can’t unfortunately highlight all of them, but let’s start anyway. This is not a official Nokia company endorsement or a seal of approval, but just a review from one designer and user.
Hi everyone. This blog as such might not be the most ideal forum for this, but if you have specific comments (rants/raves/questions) about individual parts or aspects of the current UI design, feel free to give your comments here.
However, if you have found something that is clearly a bug, please use our public bugzilla tracking system, found at http://maemo.org/bugzilla . Yes, we could and should do a better job of tracking and utilizing that system, but we’re trying to improve on that also.
Hello world! This is a new blog of the Nokia Maemo user interaction design team. Maemo is the software platform that is running in the current range of the Nokia internet tablet products. Since many of our software comrades are already blogging about their own work, it’s high time that we start our own blog.
We’ll be blogging about the various topics and issues relating to the user interface and user interaction design that we come across in our work.
However, since blogging is about direct feedback and communication, if you have any suggestions on what kinds of issues and topics would you want us to blog about, please comment and give your ideas. We’ll try our best to answer and discuss the topics that you want to hear about.
This WordPress account will be our temporary home away from home. Once we get the official Maemo site upgraded and fully functional, this blog will then probably move to that address. This will be a shared blog, with multiple persons writing entries and giving replies. We are individuals with differing personalities, so take everything we say with a healthy grain of salt. Absolute truths are very rare in the world of interaction design.When we’re not blogging, we’re busy designing new things and improving the current designs, so please have some patience with us.