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.

I never eagerly post products from my competitors or even friends, but my designer friend Josh Pyles has released UI Candy today, a beautiful resolution-independent set of glyphs for your apps, and I found the design too good to leave unmentioned. The webdesign is remarkable and eye-catching, but that shouldn’t distract from the strong set of pictograms in the pack.

I invite you to hop over to Josh’s UI Candy site and take a gander.

It’s been a while since I released the first mockups and some explanation behind my ‘Dream Browser’. Several developers have contacted me with the desire to develop it, and some have already actively begun programming whole aspects of it. I’m very pleased with the activity, and to help the efforts, I have decided to create a design document and a centralised website to manage the project development. There’s also a working name; Latitude.

For now, I have created some mockups of the full-screen browsing mode, with an automatically hiding toolbar and an image with a roughly mocked up set of tabs for the full-screen mode. Additionally, I’ve made a mockup for the history feature, activated with the ‘Time Machine’-like, which also shows the ‘expanded’ mode, which is quite similar to how Safari looks.

To get some critique and mostly misunderstanding out of the way; one of my primary goals in this browser interface is to minimalise the amount interface clutter, although it may not seem that way. I don’t want to eliminate tabs or add some sort of permanent sidebar; a browser should still be usable as we use it today. However, having multiple sidebars, menu’s, or even full overlapping views that are opened with widgets that are in wildly varying positions in the interface. This browser, as I outlined in the previous post, uses a sidebar to consolidate various features that are now scattered throughout a browser, and helps to reduce clutter by also adding elements like the conventional ‘tabs’ to the sidebar. The ‘expanded’ viewing mode, as shown in the ‘history’ interface mockup without a sidebar active, will be your preferred state for viewing content.

I’ll update this new category when the document finishes or to keep tabs on community activity. Thanks for all the input and hard work so far!

Via Jon ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch.

It was a cold day in March of this year (the sixth, to be precise) when I started the Cocoia Blog. It’s funny that with this post, I’ll probably contradict my first post on this blog; with this end-of-the-year post, I might just be turning this into a diary – at least a bit. March of that year was the dawn of an exhilarating chapter in my life.

With the risk of turning this into a cliché story, I should say that this year has probably been one of the most significant in my life. I went from being a student on the Art Academy in Groningen to being a full-time, self-employed designer and consultant, supporting my life. The paradigm shift was enormous for me; although I am a fanatic follower of the Jobs and Shipley types, I could never, subconsciously, bend my head around the basic fact that you aren’t useless as a human if you don’t have some sort of official paper proving your competence. It was at the end of the last term of the second year that the professors of the Academy smashed some sense into me. They told me that if I work hard and support myself with my work, and I get the recognition in the real world, that education wasn’t holy. In the end, I guess I had a clue, because months (in Twelve past Twelve) before that, I wrote;

I really feel like I have a clear goal, a clear ambition, and I even think there is a way for me to work it all out into a practical solution that also incorporates some kind of mechanism to keep me running monetarily — perhaps it is an illusion, but I don’t believe in failure. This is not to say there is nothing for me to achieve; I do believe in doing the wrong thing is bad, but I think there is a choice in everything and a chance therein to learn. I’ve got massive projects looming on the horizon and it’s all about expanding just that; my personal horizons. Fuck the world for now, I’ve got business to do.

And I tended to that business… in the end, it felt like an epiphany. I got the feeling that I had found that spot in life where you are no longer looking for the joy, happiness or achievement and ambition, but you settle into a state of comfort about your life and dreams. It’s not all roses, though; having had a very profound sense of ambition throughout my life, it felt discomforting at times not to have some sort of ladder to climb on. Of course, everyone has their highs and lows.

So, 2007 is on its way out, and the new year is looking promising for me. If I could divulge my agenda, I would in a blink, as the most exciting meetings, assignments, and clients I could possibly look forward to are all scheduled; there is a raw assurance in iCal on my Mac that 2008 won’t be good, it will be absolutely kickass. In the next year, I will be traveling a lot more to countries, and so I hope to meet some of the blog regulars and people I admire. I have a few icon sets in the making that will see the light in the first month of the new year, and I have no doubt that the rest of the year won’t go without more freeware icon treats. I can proudly look at the last 356 days with the knowledge that I have found a passion in my life. And when the clock strikes 12 in my time zone, I’ll be raising my glass to all of you who helped make it possible. Thanks to you — it’s been a dream.