Showing posts tagged user interface

Sometimes my mom gets confused and doesn’t realize she can scroll a page on her iPhone. She just forgets about scrolling altogether. She’s not dumb, it’s just that virtual user interfaces aren’t her thing.

I was at the Apple store today checking out the new iPad kiosks and noticed this really cool technique for hinting that a page is scrollable. You can see it in the video.

When you display a scrolling page, it first appears below the top. It then scrolls the page to the top effective telling you that you that there’s more to see “below the fold”. Clever.

Here’s a feature of Twylah that I missed

Several days ago I wrote a post about Twylah, a new web-based Twitter client that really lets you drill down into your tweets. I just discovered a really cool feature that I missed. When you click on a tweet that has a link to an article, Twylah shows you a preview of the article! Like I’ve said before, I love the little things that developers put into their products to make their day-to-day use as seamless as possible.

[Flash 10 is required to watch video]

I love it when app developers pay attention to the little things that make the daily use of their product a joy. I just discovered this little trick with Echofon when sending a reply to a Twitter user. I forgot to add the @reply before typing the message, but instead of moving my cursor to the beginning of the field I just clicked on the reply button in the tweet I was replying to, just out of curiosity. Instead of replacing my tweet with new text, it just did the right thing! Check it out in the video.

Note: this video is a reenactment of actual events, and a pretty good one if I do say so myself.

10gui

10/GUI allows the use of all ten of your fingers oriented in a keyboard-like posture. What I really like about it is the idea of a 1D linear window manager where you swipe left and right to go between windows. In fact, they define an entire gesture language that’s used system-wide to provide a consistent user experience across applications.

Maybe some of these concepts could be implemented in an iPhone app. It’s definitely got me thinking.