Clearly we should make a modular UI based on legos. Want more complexity? Add on a few more blocks. Want it simpler? Take a few blocks off. I think it should be pretty important though that not only is it simple with the ability to be complex at the disgression of the user, but it should also be simple to make complex. Ideally.

I think that the whole problem needs to be looked at from the highest levels.

From far away, OS X as a whole has a compact, clear UI. There's a menu bar on one edge of the screen, and a Dock on another edge. Within the basic metaphor of a system with multiple GUI applications, this makes a lot of sense. It's compact, it's out of the way, and it's obvious. Think about the Dock as a starting point.

Whether I'm running a browser or not, I may tend to surf the web a lot in any given day. Likewise, I'll probably want to check my email. The Dock doesn't care if I'm *running* these apps, it just cares that this is a common task, and displays that icon because I told it to do so. If the app *is* running, I get a tiny indicator of that. It's very task oriented, and as a result, I can focus on the most important tasks, because they're sitting up front, waiting for me. Nokia gets this to some extent, as they see the Maemo platform's strengths in websurfing and email, which are the two big icons that you can't get rid of. Microsoft gets this, placing the browser, email, and your most common apps in the very first part of the Start Menu.

At the same time, I've never had to interact with two separate application menu bars at once. (I'm not even sure how I would do such a thing.) The shared menubar gets the crap out of my way, and even shares space with my widgets. That's not really dumbing anything down, so much as taking out the trash.

Somewhere between the iPhone and a fully tricked out Mac OS X desktop, is a decent UI for an Internet Tablet. The Mac interface is designed for a single mouse button, though it CAN leverage more buttons. Similarly, touchscreens don't really tend to "get" right clicks and the like, so you should design around that. In the Mac's case, they were trying not to confuse the user. In this case, you're just getting around the technological limitations.

Overall, you need a UI that stays out of the way, as that's something that even a poweruser can appreciate. You know where your tools are? Run with a cut down Dock/Taskbar/Launch Bar. You don't want to dig for your core apps? Load up.

You need menus? Right up top, along with a tight set of widgets for battery life, radio status, etc. Keep it trim.

You need buttons? Well, sure, most people do, it's just faster. Even Mutt, a CLI email client, gives you a list of hotkeys and their functions right on the screen. See it, pick it, do it. Just make the buttons simple, clear, and consistent, and yes, make them BIG. If I have an 18 line button bar, each pixel should be 16 pixels tall. Fill up that bar and make nice, obvious targets.

The core problem I have with many devices is getting things done. GPE *sucks* as a mobile PIM, because it lacks that bit of polish. Sure, it's an 800-pound gorilla of options, but it's a pain to work with! On my old Treo, I'd hit the calendar button, tap on a time range, type in a description, and I'm ready to go. If I want alarms, more scheduling options, etc., I can get to a simple control widget that lets me set everything properly. On the Blackberry, I open the calendar app, scroll to a date, and start typing.

By all means, open the floodgates to a series of infinitely extensible tools, but let's get the core functions up on the first screen, with consistent UI widgets, and a simple behavior that works for everyone. The complex options should always be there, but it's okay for complex things to be complex. I've rarely heard anyone really complain about the Palm OS calendar, To-Do, or Address Book apps. They generally worked as people needed them to work, which is a mark of success.

You don't have to make the system so simple that only a child would accept it, but it should Just Work for anyone, even children, right out of the box. The fact that there's a control panel that lets you add a few features gives the customizers the basic tools that they need, but it all leaves the pre-fabricated skeleton there for anyone to use.

There! Finally someone said it. Get a trimmed down OSX-alike GUI. Stick the Dock somewhere, create gadgets in case you want to see your last mail/news/weather/IP/Wifi/IM, etc. on the main desktop, create context aware menus and leave the rest of the screen free for apps.

Don't change anything more... ;-)

Ton.

The devil's advocate cometh: If that would be the best idea, then why didn't Apple do that, with their iPhone? They own OSX, after all.

Because the iPhone is a phone and not an Internet Tablet?

Ton.

The iPhone *does* take heavily from OS X, in that it gets the UI the hell out of the way. It throws out the Dock because the screen is small, and the apps are (supposedly) locked down. Since you have a low-accuracy pointing device on the iPhone, you don't WANT an application selection method that moves and shifts and bounces.

In fact, we should think about what Apple's REALLY doing with the Dock. They're cribbing off of NeXTStep, which has already been borrowed from for Windowmaker and the like on the UNIX side.

(Additionally, the fact is, you don't really NEED the menus that Apple left out for basic functionality on the iPhone, since strictly speaking, you don't need tabbed browsing, a drop-down bookmark menu, or cut-and-paste operations on your mobile phone. Even though the rendering engine can make pages LOOK like their desktop equivalents, you're still not going to need the full toolkit. The Internet Tablet, on the other hand, has the edge in resolution and expandability, so by all means, leverage that. Forget getting *enough* application into your pocket, and get the *whole damned thing* into your bag/glove compartment/purse/etc.

Basically, I wouldn't ever place the iPhone and an 800x480 display Internet Tablet in the same exact use cases, so I wouldn't graft the exact same UI onto both.

Great posts Raptor. Thanks for adding to the discussion.

I always have to read any post praising apple ui's a few times so I can digest it and not hammer out a shotty post attacking any weak spot about the apple ui or os that I can find. That being said I really don't see why we have to keep saying 'oh, it needs to be like osx'. Apple has a good ui. It hurts me a bit to say that, and personally I hate the UI, but i recognize that it has the things a good ui should have. But it isn't perfect. I might just be ranting a bit, but can't we look past that a bit? Every device striving to stuff an apple ui into their photocopier might be an improvement in some areas, but it'd be nice to innovate a few things. A dock somewhere could be good for the tablets, something with a few hardcoded buttons, maybe a browser, email client, stuff like that, a few buttons that are just the most often used apps. I think the contextual things we discussed earlier would be a good thing to put in there though. What is the point of having an internet browser taking up a button on the dock when you have limited screen real estate and havn't established an internet connection yet? Why not have the browser button be a 'establish internet connection' button to bring up the connection selector, and after you are connected it switches to the browser button. I think we need to move towards things like that, intelligent ui's, rather than just simple attractive and task oriented ui's. UI's that predict the task you want to accomplish and rearrange themselves to accomodate that. Also, I think the current system of when a program is running, it having an icon sitting in a task bar is better than the apple style 'lets always have the same icons in the dock thingy no matter whats running', especially on an internet tablet where you really dont want to be accidently leaving things running considering your limited resources. I really do not think the apple system does a good job of visually alerting me to what and how many things I'm currently running. Yes, if you want to use a browser, clicking the browser button to bring up a browser, either from it's minimized state if its running, or starting a new one, 'makes sense', but i'm not convinced it's such a good thing, and personally it drives me nuts, but it might just be since I've been rocking taskbars for years, and tend to do things that require nearly all of my avaliable resources at any give them.

Oh, I've got more.

I'm looking at all of the various options available to low-res systems running a desktop-class OS, and the flaws are just *screaming out* at me.

First off, just take a look at most of the email options on the 770. There's a three-pane design at work here, but there's no room for all the panes! People always seem to demo the wonder of sliding pane dividers in these apps, which completely misses the point. I'm on a device which I can use with a stylus or with my thumb. I don't *want* to try to grab a border and drag it, depending on my needs. I want nothing more than to read my email, ideally with a full-fledged IMAP client that understands my (admittedly complicated) Maildir structure.

The Blackberry UI sucks for this. Sure, it understands subfolders, but the average user won't know that. The iPhone also sucks, since it's too busy condensing your email to fit into a simple list structure for fast, easy reading.

Gmail, however, more or less "gets it." If I want to move a bunch of messages to a subfolder, I select them (tap, tap, tap,) hit a drop-down menu, and label them. Message preview mode gives me a rough idea of what I'm looking at, and with a few tweaks, and a slightly more dynamic UI, I could see everything at once, while retaining the control that I need without all the excessive whitespace of three separate boxes, each with a scrollbar attached.

Likewise, I'm looking at various UI screenshots for GPE and the like, and I keep on seeing the same problems. Lots of whitespace, lots of menubars and buttons, and no actual room for data. It's basically a case of cramming the desktop UI into a display ranging from 320x240 up to 800x480, when the apps practically demand 1024x768 at a minimum. I run Visio on a 1280x1024 screen, for that matter, and I *still* don't have enough on-screen real estate, because the tools are all over the place. Since the MID/IT/UMPC market is all about giving you a desktop class view of your data, people tend to misinterpret that as giving you a desktop-style view of your data manipulation tools, and there's just no room for it. Just look at Firefox. Between the title menubar, the navigation bar, the bookmark bar, the tab bar, and the status bar, you're eating up 96+ lines. That's 20% of your content, GONE to UI cruft. The IT browser is a little smarter, cramming the menubar into the title, showing relevant statusbar content in the nav bar, and doing away with the bookmark bar entirely, but there's still too much "fat" in the UI. If the browser supported tabs, that would eat up a line of content, even though it would help with large chunks.

So far, it looks like the Mobile Ubuntu work within Hildon seems to get the basic ideas, compressing the tools, while expanding the view of the necessary data. With those concepts in mind, tabs *should* go away, to be replaced with a single "page indicator" item in the nav bar. Tap on that, and you get a popup list of open tabs to choose from. (Heck, you could possibly place this in the titlebar.)

Overall, I think the perfect UI would take the best of the desktop and the actual PDA interfaces. Use lightweight PDA style controls, with clumsy, tap-friendly elements, but use them to expose as many tools as possible. Use an application-centric, not a document-centric app manager, to reduce clutter, but make sure that every app supports an identical MDI, be it multi-window, tabs, or just a window list pop-up from a tap-and-hold action.

On top of that, allow widgets to live on top of your applications, when needed. Reading a webpage, but want to skip a track on your music player? Bring up a widget, hit "Skip," and keep on reading. New email alert? Read the widget, which would have just the address and subject line, and decide from there if it's worth switching to your email app.

Humm. What about how IM clients in desktop environments discretely (well, sometimes not so discretely...) pop up a little notifacation in the right bottom corner of the screen when someone comes on or messages you while you are focusing on another window? Maybe when the media player changes the song, it pops up the song info and then the basic play/pause/next/prev so you can control it quickly based on the new song that it just began. But if you don't pay attention to it, it will just go back into hiding quickly and leave you to whatever you were doing.