Thread: N900 specs revealed
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ragnar is offline ragnar
2009-05-25 , 21:27
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#230
Originally Posted by lma View Post
IMHO in terms of usability the Maemo UI peaked at 3.x. There were some great ideas there like modifying the UI behaviour according to stylus vs finger input, work being done for resolution independence and so on. I understand there were limitations in the touchscreen hardware of the time, but if those could be worked out somehow instead of abandoning tablet-style usage patterns a lot of customers would be much happier.

It's not quite a deal breaker for me because the underlying system is much better and more open now, and I can tolerate a bad UI up to a point. But given a choice I would definitely go for the UI that optimises the use of screen real estate and the number of taps needed to do things rather than the one with the eye candy.
Having been a member in the Maemo 3 UI design team as well as the upcoming Maemo 5 UI, and having been involved in creating and driving the stylus/finger detection UI's there in Maemo 3, I'd say as the designer of that particular feature that it wasn't a really great idea. It was a neat trick, but I/we massively underestimated the workload of doing it actually properly.

Still, launching finger keyboard while pressing with a finger, launching stylus keyboard while tapping with a stylus, it was a nice idea. Then again, we're going towards finger based UI's, as has been already discussed previously. Nobody is pulling their stylus out just to start typing.

But the latter part actually I don't get. The Maemo 5 UI is far better than Maemo 3, in virtually every regard. Using it is a much more pleasurable experience. Where do you even get the idea that it would be optimized for eye candy? That we wouldn't optimize for the screen estate? That the designers would have suddenly gone insane? How can you even say that?
 

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