Re: Intelligent UIs, my main problem is that I never want a UI that tries to outsmart me. First off, it can't, and second off, I operate off of muscle memory. If I want to pull up a browser in XP/Vista, I know where I place my Quick Launch buttons, and I know that it's also the top option on the Start Menu. Likewise, I know where Safari is on the Dock. (I also know where to find Blazer on a Treo, or where I've placed Opera Mini on my Blackberry.)

I would also note that the MID/IT way of thinking isn't terribly work-oriented at all times, especially for someone like you, working in graphics design. (Granted, that field alone polarizes people either for or against the Mac, I've never seen someone in an art department who can maintain OS neutrality.) I can only imagine that something like the Adobe Creative Suite apps will suck up every ounce of your attention, with the toolbars all over the place, and the fact that on sufficiently high-res assets, you'll be using up the whole screen to make sure that your work is pixel-perfect.

By comparison, I'm in IT. I've got half a dozen web-based apps, ranging from monitoring to log analyzers, plus email, IM tools, remote management consoles, and terminal sessions all over the place. I'm a timeslicing mess, and I manage to keep it all going by grouping the hell out of everything. The OS X way of doing things, for me, tends to be insanely fast compared to the Windows/Linux methods, which are painfully identical in all the wrong ways.

I liken it to juggling versus tightrope walking. I'm keeping a million things from hitting the ground, and I need a system that helps me maintain that juggling. It's neither harder nor easier than tightrope walking, in which you need to keep only one thing from hitting the ground, but that one thing has a much higher personal value. I'm going to wager that the two of us may need slightly different UIs for maximum effect, since I'm constantly outstripping the default utility of my gadgets. Before ditching my Treo, it was also an IRC client, an SSH client, a remote control for my Tivo, a portable weatherman, oh, and something about email and telephony. My 770 handled VPN connections, MS Remote Desktop, and gobs of desktop applications. (Like most gadget geeks, the N800 would be a better choice for me, but I can't justify dropping that kind of cash again.) It's gotten so bad for me that I tend not to carry the 770 anymore, but instead use a Sony UX, which gives me the entire remote toolkit I need without compromise (aside from possibly killing any chance of decent vision in 20 years.) I'm a juggler. I need all of my apps accessible quickly, and making me search for them is going to ruin that for me. (Making them as sluggish, flaky, and overall kludge-like as they are on IT OS 2006 is going to have the same effect.)

As for your pop-up idea, that's all well and good, but I'm thinking that a widget-mode would still be useful when you decide to check on your communications. Why not pull up a comms widget that shows you the last 10 IMs/emails you've received, just in case you've been ignoring them in favor of your current app? Tapping on any of those items would just switch you to the app, but you could also choose to ignore it.

Admittedly, as you might be able to tell, I use XP, Vista, and OS X quite a bit. I'm quite used to Outlook systray popups, and love them. AIM systray popups, I could happily abandon. Mac Mail.app does seem to work out well for me too, since the new message count is a nice, obvious notifier. iChat's nice for that, but I've got too many IM accounts open at once, so I used Adium back then. The neat thing is that I can survive on OS X at 1024x768 as a workstation, but I need a lot more pixels for Windows these days. I've used an 800x480 Win2K system, mind you, but that was at 64MB of RAM, so I couldn't run enough apps to outpace the UI's restrictions. The 770 lets me do that, since I'm RDPing into something that lets me treat an 800x480 display like it's attached to a full blown workstation.

I think we're having a bit of a miscommunication when it comes to widgets here. I think I'm not understating your terminology properly. So are you saying there be a bar at the top or side or where ever that has these little things you can click to quickly check up on things in the world outside your current application? I think you are right about the whole me and people doing what I do may prefer one ui while you and people like you may prefer another thing. I'm sitting in a cubefarm working an IT job right now as I type this, so I do have an idea of where you are coming from. But then that also begs the question, would it be better to have a UI that works pretty well for both you and me, or a UI with maybe two seperate modes, one that is really good for me, and one that is really good for you? That to me reminds me of windows mobile homescreen layouts. Phones come with a ton of them, and all of them seem like they are tailored for something different. I picked a simple one with a clock and quick access to my sms and my profiles, without cluttering up the pretty moon picture on my desktop too much, because it suits what I usually do. But theres another one with a slide up menu that has pretty much all of the useful things youd have to go to the start menu for, which is probably great for someone juggling a who bunch of apps and is a bit less concerned with simplicity of access to just their profile and messaging. Admitedly my IT is more of a toy to me, it isn't a productivity tool in any way, so from that perspective as well, our ui needs probably differ pretty greatly. How do you go about satisfying contrasting use styles with a single UI, or do you simply offer your users a choice between UI's in order to conquer that? This is getting pretty close to the whole 'Nokia needs to release an N series multimedia IT and an E series business IT' thing again.

1) Widgets, as we're discussing, would be closer to the items that site in the Google Desktop/Windows Vista sidebars, or in the OS X Dashboard. Sticky notes, weather modules, iTunes control, that sort of thing, but pulled up one at a time, and sitting as a tiny window *on top of* your running app. (The Matchbox WM on the 770 is designed to run one app at fullscreen, and that limitation becomes fairly obvious at times.)

2) If you give your average user a million ways to do something, he'll use the one that he's given by default, and complain about how it's not what he wants, even if UI option #3 is *exactly* what he wants.

3) I'm coming from an app-centric model here that does seem to compact and reduce itself quite nicely. If you wanted, for example, you could have an OS X dock with nothing in it but your Applications and Trash folders, and you could keep that at a measly 16 pixels tall. In that case, if it's in the Dock, it's running. If not, it's not. If you want quick access, you can customize your folder view accordingly, or even build a tree of aliases to present things just the way you like.

I'm still not advocating a Dock as it exists on the Mac, mind you. I think that it's a waste of space, and needs to be integrated more intelligently, since we don't want to give up any valuable pixels on the ideal MID (really, Intel's definitions aside, the 770 and N800 are clearly Mobile Internet Devices on ARM chips instead of x86.) The iPhone did the best job it could, but a MID is not an iPhone. Since the MID's application base can expand, you need a UI that can cleanly display an infinite number of applications. You need a clear, concise way to switch applications. You need a clean method to display data FROM other applications without switching. You need consistent, minimalist UI elements. The Maemo system tray is too tall, for example. The Maemo applications have relatively narrow icons. The email client, bane of my existence, has a massive static icon that I never use. There are wavy lines and flashy contours all over the place that don't do me a damned bit of good. Spacing the icons out is fine, but adding extra chrome when there's no room for it isn't acceptable in this case.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MobileAndEmbedded/UserInterface The Ubuntu Mobile guys have a few really nice ideas here, and while it needs some cleaning up, I think this is the right direction overall.

I've probably mentioned this before, but I think Launcher III on Palm is a hard-to-beat interface for a touchscreen. I've used it for years.

You can create a set of tabs, (screenshot in the link), each of which can be set to different views (2,3 or 4 columns of icons or a list). You can sort apps into the tabs just by dragging them to the tab name.

So to get to most apps I press power button, tap the Home button to get the launcher, then it is usually just one more tap, since I set it to always start on the first tab and keep my favorite apps there (and there are few enough I don't need to scroll).

Awww, I came in this thread expecting mock-ups! I scanned all the pages quickly for drawings/concept art. I apologize if I'm thread-hijacking (I didn't read any of the posts, except for the first couple, some weeks ago) but I think it would be really cool if someone were to take all the suggestions here in these 8 pages and try to culminate them into some concept art.

No problem. I'd love to see some mockups!