Olivier Charavel

Tablet UI thoughts

Long time I’ve not post things here. I was just busy (and I still am) but definitely not dead.

Anyway I thought it’d be nice to post some of my thoughts on the tablet UI that is going to be shown tonight (I’ll laugh my ass if there’s no tablet) at the Apple keynote. I sadly didn’t have time to make polished mockups so I thought making crappy whiteboard sketches with comments would be better (and faster to do too).

The Dashboard
I found pretty logical that we should go away from the Desktop experience to something “smaller”. So I took a look at the Dashboard, you have widgets you can put around your screen and you can run several ones.

1. Home

This is probably the most crappy sketch you’ve ever seen. Any-wayyy. This brings the basis of the UI to me. You have some applications running already (I wrote the names so you know what is what, you definitely don’t need that big frame with it to recognize the apps while using the tablet) and you can add more by tapping the “+” circled icon at the bottom left.

You can also scroll in the apps without having to open them fullscreen (see “5. Running fullscreen applications”, move them around, remove them from the Home space, etc…

2. Pinch to zoom

This is something I thought would be pretty nice, you could pinch to zoom on an application to make it bigger to read text easily for example.
If you’re taking a look at your mails or at your notes and you decide to browse the Internet to search for something, you could just pinch to zoom Safari to make it bigger.

3. Add applications

This works just like the Dashboard. You tap on the little “Add” icon in the bottom left to reveal some kind of a dock where you have all your apps. I guess you could search for some in that space too. You just drag one and drop it wherever you want on the Home. When you’re done you just close that Dock.

4. Hold an application to move it or delete it

This one works just like on the iPhone. You hold on an application to move it around or delete it by tapping on its little cross icon. From this step, you could also do it on the Dock to remove applications on the device (and obviously download them again on the App Store).

5. Running fullscreen applications

If you want to run applications in fullscreen mode (à la iPhone basically), you simply just tap (or double tap) on an application. To quit it, I think you already guessed, you have to thanks the Home button on the device for that.

That’s pretty much it for the thoughts I had in my little head. I’m probably wrong but it’s been stuck in it for quite some time now and I thought it’d be nice to share that with you before the keynote. I can definitely imagine that Apple will bring the tablet apps into OS X later on to replace the widgets.

I really wanted to make polished mockups but work is taking a lot of my time. So here you have crappy sketches and maybe (probably) stupid (OR BRILLIANT) ideas haha.