So how many options are there exactly? Let’s limit ourselves to the US. And AT&T, MetroPCS, T-Mobile and Verizon. And I won’t show all the options of colors.

Take your pick.

It’s none of the above. I’m putting Cocoia in carbonite for a while as I start my first full-time job in the United States: I will be joining doubleTwist as Chief Creative Officer, responsible for overseeing and working on the design, interaction and polish of all their apps and services. I’ve been working with the awesome people at doubleTwist as a freelancer for years now and I’m really, really stoked to give them my full attention. We’ve been working on some extremely cool stuff.

I’ve interviewed with over a dozen companies early this year, and my joining doubleTwist is the conclusion of a long period of weighing all the awesome opportunities I had. You may have seen me traverse all the valley campuses on social networks as I ‘shopped’ around. A luxury problem if there ever was one: picking a job from all these kickass companies. doubleTwist is undoubtedly the best choice, though: working with Jon (– of ‘DVD Jon‘ fame) and Monique has always been a pleasure, and the other staff are some of the most detail oriented and talented I’ve known in the industry.

In related news, I will be moving to San Francisco soon. As a city, it’s a fantastic place to live. As a place, it’s where I truly feel at home out of all the places in the world. I can’t wait to be living and working there.

What does this mean to you, my reader and / or customer, and my ‘behavior’ online? Icon Resource and other Cocoia products will still be supported and developed. I will still work on side projects, UI breakdowns, speak at conferences and (loudly) voice my opinion on things. I will be working more with Android (and possibly, as they emerge, more mobile OSes).

I will, however, no longer accept freelance work. After six years of freelance designing, this is truly the end of an era. Thanks to all my awesome clients, large and small, and my ‘competitors’ for being awesome inspiring designers I was proud to share a market with. You know who you are. I’m sure we’ll work together again in the future. For now, goodbye.

And, of course, I’ll be showing off some of the awesome things I’ve been working on for doubleTwist very soon.

And I can relate: when I am abroad, with my three email accounts, whenever I open Mail on my iPhone, I have to dismiss three ‘data roaming is off’ dialogs, and three ‘cannot get mail’ dialogs ( — that’s one per mail account). On an iPad, it can be even more jarring, with a tiny alert disabling the whole 9.7″ screen until you act on it.

This is a real issue. I have no doubt Apple is aware of this, like they were aware of copy and paste and multi-tasking.

This is not a post about what Apple will or should do to improve notifications on iOS. It’s a post talking about what solutions other platforms currently use to notify the user, and why Apple is (possibly, probably) taking such a while to create an optimal solution to the notification problem.

The biggest current smartphone OS, Android, has a well-known approach to notifications. They gather in the status bar, a never-hiding, tap / swipe-able interface element at the top* of the screen that slides down to cover the entire UI when invoked. When notifications come in, icons gather in the bar. Note that these icons gather at the left, while system status icons illustrating current battery life, signal strength, 3G status, Wi-Fi status, time, location services status and more gather at the right. As you can probably tell by that line-up of status items, it doesn’t take a lot of notifications on Android to fill up the entire top bar.

Most casual users I know solve this by either sliding the status bar down and using the ‘Clear All’ function to get rid of the unmanageable and opaque mess of icons or manage all the notifications as they come in, so they don’t miss anything important when it does pop up between the others.

Notifications have interesting design consideration you have to take into account: priority. For instance, Android attaches equal UI importance to a notification telling the user that the phone is connected through USB, that there’s new mail, and that there’s one missed call. They all get the same sized icon in the top bar. Only very rarely does Android throw a modal dialog on screen demanding action, like iOS does for most of its notifications.

You could say Android’s solution to all that incoming information is to throw them into a big junk drawer. Organized people will no doubt create a system around the drawer and find all their stuff in it, but why put that burden on the user? I don’t want to manage the information flow — it’s a smartphone, right?

What about webOS? I’ve seen a lot of arguments in online discussions that webOS is about as good a solution for notifications as Android. I disagree. webOS handles notifications in a far more clever way.

To illustrate that, let’s grab a smartphone. Anything the size between a tiny Palm Pre or a huge HTC EVO 4G will do. Hold it in your left or right hand, and tap the bottom of the screen with your thumb. No effort, right? Now tap the top of the screen. See how much more effort that takes? I’ve got pretty big hands, and tapping the status bar of my iPhone 4 forces me to stretch my thumb. Fortunately, I never have to tap the status bar unless I want to scroll to the top of a long content view.

For exactly this reason, and the aforementioned ‘clutter bar’ of Android, webOS cleverly puts notifications at the bottom. In mobile UI design, it’s often recommended to put the most accessed controls at the bottom. In fact, it’s in the iOS HIG. As a notification comes in, webOS shrinks the screen a little bit, shows you some of its content with an icon and then puts a little icon at the bottom of the screen. You tap it, and it shows the notification content, allowing you to act on it, ignore it, or swipe it out of view. This doesn’t just prevent you from stretching fingers, it doesn’t clutter the webOS status bar with icons that tell you little to none about the device’s status. With some stretching, you can still swipe down on the status bar to reveal a quick menu that lets you enable / disable Wi-Fi and other system actions.

I’d say webOS has one of the most elegant systems for notifications on the market today, even compared to desktop OSes. Even when the notification ‘tray’ fills up with a lot of Facebook, Gowalla, Twitter, SMS, low battery and USB mode alerts, it’s a manageable mess.

Let’s look at the video I referred to at the beginning of my post again. When notifications come in, they literally cover the screen. Is there a control below the notification? Tough luck. Act on it now, or lose that part of your screen. It’s not shown, but if it scales like I think it does, it will simply fill your entire screen with three to four notifications. Going back to my example of Mail on iOS, that would mean I have to do more than tapping “Okay” six times to get back to interacting with my phone. How is this “iOS Notifications done right”?

I’ll keep looking forward to what the talented design teams at Apple are doing to tackle the hard-as-nails problem of notifications.

My views are my own and not those of Apple Inc. I do not have access to information on upcoming designs or interface conventions of iOS or other aspects of Apple products. All content of this blog post is uninformed speculation and opinion, attributable to my own person only.

Yesterday, HP (fare ye well, Palm) announced its summer device lineup, far in advance of release. Presumably, to let developers start working on apps early and show consumers they might want to hold out on getting that Android or iOS tablet. Leaving discussion about the (lack of) wisdom of announcing now and tea-leaf reading of when we might see the competition show up out of things, I want to focus on the new devices’ hardware and share some thoughts on their user interface.

The TouchPad:

Gesture Area / “Home Button”: The TouchPad actually lacks the familiar (and brilliant) Pre / Pixi ‘gesture area’, which lets you swipe left or right and up to respectably go forward or back in navigation or open the launcher for opening apps. Several employees familiar with the matter told me that in the development phase of the TouchPad, the gesture area (or having even four of them on each side of the screen) didn’t hold up as a usable solution. The real question for developers and interface designers is how going back and forth in apps is handled now. I suspect it would be a button in the UI, much like in iOS.

Panes: While some bloggers are quick to dismiss parts of the TouchPad UI as ‘rip offs’ of iPad’s, more study reveals there’s a lot of clever work in there. Personally, I never use my iPad in portrait because Mail, for instance, is barely usable without a list of emails to easily jump back and forth for triage.

The TouchPad solves this problem with ‘grabbers’ on the toolbars of each pane. The user can easily rearrange the UI layout, either showing the email content completely, or showing a both the source list and the content. Further scrolling the email content away reveals the Mail accounts, similar to the navigation stack of the emails column on iPad. It’s a clever solution that’s implemented in all multi-pane apps on the system and never locks you in to a layout.

Notifications: Obviously, the notifications UI is one of webOS’ core strengths. Not even Android handles incoming information and user notifications this elegantly. On the tablet, they settled with bringing them up in the status bar. Android (on phones) also puts notification icons in the status bar, and with the status (wifi, battery, network, alarm) icons, it quickly turns into a bar literally filled with icons and badges. This made me a bit pessimistic about the notification handling on webOS for tablets.

Fortunately, it’s actually quite great. Notifications slide in from the top, separate from the clock and status information: something like an email would come in, show sender and subject and then slide right and fade out into a subtle white email icon. The notifications get their own, clearly demarcated area in the status bar and some can even be swiped through from there:

Overall, a very nicely designed experience. Once again, iOS looks rather bad with either only using badges or tiny, yet modal dialogs interrupting your workflow.

The Pre 3: (image by Engadget)

The Pre 3 has an IPS LCD (valuable information I got loose yesterday) screen at 800×480. I am very happy that it doesn’t use (SAM)OLED technology, as in my opinion they’re a bad stopgap to solve the LCD pixel density and power usage problem. You start to wonder what kind of contracts Apple has with Sharp, considering only Sharp and Apple currently ship devices with 960×640 pixel IPS LCD displays. I bet some of the billions in cash they spend was used to buy a lot — if not all — of Sharp’s manufacturing capacity for these extremely advanced screen panels.

That out of the way, the panel on the Pre 3 is beautiful. Its viewing angles are great, the colors pop, and it has a great black point. Representatives from Palm were very pressing in letting me know the hardware wasn’t completely final, but I believe we won’t see changes to the display quality at this point.

Size-wise (I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of it next to my iPhone) it’s almost the same size as the iPhone. It’s slightly thicker but quite slim, which is a feat considering the built-in keyboard. The screen is slightly larger (3.6″) than the iPhone 4′s. There are no plans to enable an on-screen keyboard.

The Veer:

At the hands-on area it seemed the Veer is pretty much done. It’s an impressive device: it has absolutely no lagginess, the build quality is extremely impressive. Not much to say on designing for it, as it’s the device I am least interested in, but the display quality looked good: standard density (comparable to, say, the Pre / Pixi) but nice viewing angles. Nothing to write home about.

Miscellaneous Design Thoughts and answers to Twitter questions:

When you dock your webOS device (wirelessly), it goes into ‘Exhibition’ mode, which can show things like a clock, upcoming events, notifications and photo slideshows. It’s said webOS will include a feature to intelligently switch between what to show in Exhibition based on your physical location.

Touching a webOS phone and tablet lets them ‘push’ information to each other, like sharing a webpage. This is an impressive technology — I couldn’t get any answers on what is being used for this. Presumably NFC.

TouchPad can take calls and texts from webOS phones thanks to Bluetooth pairing.

No official word on it, but HP aims for ‘global availability’ of new webOS products.

No word on UI conventions for PC / Laptop webOS.

App dock icons (and dock height) for the TouchPad / Pre 3 are 63 pixels. They’re smaller on the screen of the Pre 3, obviously, due to the much higher pixel density, but an interesting bit regardless.

It seems current icon guidelines call for realistically rendered (OS X-style) app icons, glyphs in circles for toolbar icons and colored, more detailed icons for source lists and source panes.

Designing for various screen sizes is made easier through Palm’s development model and tools, which are obviously based on web technologies like CSS. With non-pixel units it’s quite easy to ensure widgets and text scale right. Apps can be built with Palm’s new ‘Enyo’ framework to scale a multi-pane tablet view to a simple one-column view on phones. Truly a ‘universal’ approach to developing applications.

And that’s all. Feel free to leave more questions in the comments.

Now, when Sony does a bold claim like this, I get very excited. The interface they introduced in 2003 with the mediocre “PSX” product and later used as the main UI for their flagship consoles like the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable was known as the “XrossMediaBar“, and despite its awkward — ‘X-treme marketing’ — name, it was (and still is) an amazing piece of work. In fact, Sony managed to innovate in the stale and extremely unfriendly gaming console interface and create something that was devoid of useless flashy crap, extremely scalable, discoverable, elegant and intuitive.

That’s why it’s no surprise that Sony has decided to outright kill the XMB in its PSP2 console and replace it with an absolute train-wreck UI that shows they lost all sense of what a good interface looks like.

What prompted Sony to kill its primary user interface, which won awards and got major praise? Some people may say that the almost childish, late-nineties ‘bubble icon’ look they have going on in the new interface (marketing-named “LiveArea”) is key to be friendlier for the touch-based interactions the new device will have. However, the Xross Media Bar was easily adjustable for touch, and even while I’d admit there’s a great argument to design a new interface around touch (after all, XMB was specifically optimized for the PlayStation controller input), departing from all of XMB’s core values is hard to justify. We can say LiveArea wasn’t made the way it is purely for making touch input easier.

However, let’s take a look at the competition Sony is facing.

The 3DS, set to release early this year, with Nintendo’s typical interface aesthetic.

… and of course iOS, the touch-based elephant in the room. Apple’s begun marketing the iPod touch as a gaming device and now has several “triple A” titles in the App Store (their actual gameplay quality remains up for debate).

(iPhone photo by Anthony Sigalas)

Ah, now we see why Sony pressured several of its (no doubt talented) interaction and visual designers to disregard their feelings and years of experience to create a saltless and hideous “me-too” interface. Sony is afraid that its sterile and modern aesthetic actually scared off potential customers, particularly the more casual gamers. I have no doubt that there may be some truth in that (I suppose Android 3.0 for tablets will be a good test of that, with its extremely geek-techy look), but to say “LiveArea” is the solution…

Actual usage of LiveArea will show how much of a failure it actually is. But for now, I mourn the loss of the mindset at Sony that led to innovations in interface design which enabled millions of users to get more out of their feature-rich consoles. To decide your interfaces shouldn’t necessarily ape those of your competitors takes balls, and I’m afraid Sony’s put all of those in LiveArea — in the wrong way.