Kate Alhola's Forum Nokia Blog - Some thoughs about maemo animated UI technologies

Demand for HIGs

2009-04-13T19:04:50Z

I agree about demand of HIGs.

I just would like to remind that in Fremantle, there is Hildon desktop composite window manager that makes animated the desktop efects. There are also Clutter and Qt toolkits that provide animation toolkit for applications. There will not be animated widget library yet. And because the animated widget library does not exist, but the abstraction level is plain Clutter or OpenGL, there will not be HIG for it.

OpenGL and animation toolkits were one of most wanted features add to maemo and now we have them. Next step is to have more.

Demand for HIGs

2009-04-13T15:02:41Z

I think most of us appreciate the early release of the snapshot of the SDK.
I also agree that there are many steps to take to get to a good and consistent and yet modern UI.

Still I believe it is crucial to have User (Human) Interface Guidelines laid out in a very early phase of the project. For one, this makes it possible to discuss potential problems and on the other hand allows developers to prepare their applications to adhere these guidelines.

I am quite sure that many parts of the upcoming Clutter interfaces have already been defined as they are most likely in advanced development already.
However I wonder if there is a common UI concept behind all of them and if so, how thorough such specification is laid out.

It is clear that there are disclosure concerns but given the demand for a good and consistent interface in todays market it would be wise for Nokia to be as open as possible about it.
We should also keep in mind, that not only developers (even to a less extend) are designing interfaces. Andrew Zhilin for example had some excellent ideas on his blog. Still there is basically no feedback from Nokia on how those ideas match the concepts and plans of the upcoming Maemo interface.

Providing Clutter and Kinetic only helps developers for now to get used to the concepts and APIs behind it. Having an open HIG would allow people like Andrew to contribute to the concepts and innovate in this field.

I hope I made my point clear, that there is a synergetic demand for such documents, as Nokia (Maemo SW), developers and usability experts would benefit from it.

NOW is the time for a consistent UI

2009-04-13T03:14:42Z

> Now is time for innovate, time to get ideas to
> converging consistent UI comes afterwards.

I'm really saddened to see you make this point - if this is what you (and, presumably, others in Nokia) believe then there really is no hope for the Maemo platform, the competition will make your next attempt at an inconsistent UI look amateurish without even trying. The competition have got UI consistency nailed down, they even wrote a book on UI consistency. And they gave that book to their developers. What are Nokia doing? Telling us to roll our own?? Where is your book on UI design for the Maemo platform?

A usable, consistent mobile UI is what Maemo and Nokia tablets have been crying out for since their inception, that's 3+ years ago and here we are, today in early 2009, with a senior Nokia developer suggesting that a consistent UI isn't required? Ye Gods! I don't mean to offend you Kate but please, get a clue - UI consistency is everything! :(

I really couldn't care less about animated widgets and OpenGL-ES2 when the fundamentals of the Maemo UI are badly thought through, it's a mess.

Personally, I'm tired of the outdated, slip-shod, incosistent and frankly cr@p UI that has been provided in Maemo 1 through 4, and would be overjoyed to see Nokia deliver a coherent, consistent and usable user interface along with a well specified interface guide.

The widgets, animation and eye-candy can come LATER - let's just get the basics right first!

Consistency

2009-04-12T11:19:41Z

While I totally agree, that old fashioned widgets are not the best solution, the main problem I see is UI consistency.
When every developer uses his own ideas on how to implement a "flashy" interface, a user will have to re-learn concepts for every application he uses.

Apple did it right, by providing a set of great widgets and most importantly a strict Human Interface Guideline.

For some applications new interface approaches might be good, especially since there is a lot of room to innovate.
But I guess for most applications it would be better to have guidelines and some ready made widgets targeted at small-screen devices. Here something like the Qt Embedded Widgets comes to mind http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/03/23/embedded-widgets-source-code-released/ ...
Maybe even some abstraction that uses Kinetic or Clutter to provide a basic set of preferred animations and ways to interact.

That said, I hope Nokia and the Maemo SW team realizes the urgent need for some strict and thorough User Interface Guidelines that are available to the public. Especially when written with animated UIs in mind.