Gabor Torok's Forum Nokia Blog - Static vs active application icons

Hi everyone.

A few days ago, I was surfing the web and I found out a project that works over most mobile phones which lets you know where your friends are in real time and update your status in twitter. It´s called Dimdix.

On their website they say you don´t need a GPS system to detect your location. Does anyone know how this works?

I´m using a Motorola L7 and amazingly it detected my location.

I cannot stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.

If anyone wants to take a look you can go here

Thanks,

Regards,

Juan

I'd love to see this personally, but probably a bit more advanced than just showing a state change.

For example, a puslating contact's icon would mean that someone in your addy book is located nearby. An onfocus event would just show the person's name in a tooltip like manner.

For items like SMS/MMS/Email, having a pulsing icon that then shows the number of new items would be a good idea. Could also have a state for the email icon when connectivity has errored out.

The idea being to not just show (passive) items, but also give an incentive to interact having been notified. And because these are icons, rather than all out system prompts, there is less disruption on the side of the user that needs to be interacted with before its ignoted. An icon state can be ignored, or it can be paid attention to at the discretion of the user, rather than the need of the application.

Performance concerns?

This would indeed be very useful, and I especially like the idea of saving screen real-estate as well as complexity by merging indicators and application icons, and thus generally reducing the number of entities on the screen (perhaps to the point where the root folder of the Menu and the Idle screen could be merged into one, without seeming cluttered).

A "new mail" envelope that appears on top of the icon that lets you open the message would actually make it much clearer what you have to do to read the message.

One thing that would worry me a bit about this is that it could easily lead to solutions that work great in prototype, but ultimately don't deliver in a real handset.

Having full widgets as icons on the Active Standby screen would bring the risk of always carrying the entire web browser along, and loading even more components when the phone starts up already and/or replacing entire menus that consisted of a simple listbox before with web page (if you have ever waited for the "Add/Remove Software" dialog in Windows to open, you know what I mean...).

However, I would be very much in favour of a simple framework for an application to refresh its icon in the menu and the Active Idle screen, by just updating the SVG behind it - this would probably be something that people could put to all sorts of creative uses.