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Posts: 1,986 | Thanked: 7,698 times | Joined on Dec 2010 @ Dayton, Ohio
#3
Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
So perhaps the best starting point would be to look around the existing desktop environments and seeing if any of them could be suitable on a keyboardless touchscreen device with minimal changes.
Aha, now that brings up something I recall from long ago; back when screen space was at a real premium, I tried playing around with some tiling window managers. The main advantage of these is that you can put pretty much every single pixel of the display to use; no wasting of space on drop-down shadows, minimal window border decorations, etc. Plus, you'd get Dave's favorite split-screen functionality for free, only you'd be able to split the screen into as many pieces as you'd like...



The second thing I would suggest naturally comes from the first anyway but I will spell it out just in case. Focus on function, not the form.
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Good old Palm did that just right: the dot was a dot without a shift in both the letter and the number mode. Why? Because they cared about workflow down to the minute details like that.
Ah, well, to do that you really need to understand the workflow down to the minute details. I would know that for some things, not for others. I would think the only way to really accomplish this goal would be to make it easy both for users to explain their workflow needs in precise detail, and to make it easy to adapt the UI to those needs. Making the UI open will help a lot for the second task; not sure how to manage the first task, though...
 

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