Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you

Desktop widgets have reached hundreds of millions of users in recent years - OS X Dashboard, Windows Gadgets, Yahoo Widgets and tons of web widgets have all helped the uptake of lightweight, single purpose applications that run in a limited screen estate.

The mobile space has - as many times before - been inspired by the desktop and a number of widget standards are out there; JIL, W3C, Android to name a few.

From a design point of view, widgets are often fun to create. They should do one thing very well, compared to full blown apps that have tons of edge cases that take months to design and specify. Designing a widget is a perfect mobile interaction design 101 task, a bit like when architecture students design a chair during their first semester.

So how come there are so many badly designed widgets out there?

Consider the OS X Dashboard weather widget. It looks great and tells you the weather right now, but most people are able to look out the window to see if it's sunny. Sure, knowing the outside temperature in the morning helps you decide what to wear, but should it cover a majority of the widget area?

Wouldn't it be wiser to spend more on the upcoming weather and less on the current weather? You can expand the OS X widget to show the upcoming weather as well, but it’s still using half the widget area to show the current conditions. And that’s still using numbers instead of graphics ot show the temperatures.

Doesn’t Apple know that an analogue (bars) representation rather than a digital one (digits) makes it easier to compare temperature between days?

In a mobile context, spending a lot of screen estate on the current weather is even worse because
a) Screens are small and every pixel counts

You’re more likely to be outside and thus don’t need a widget to tell you it’s too cold

We really love what HTC has done with Hero and their awesome Sense UI. The visual design is flawless and they have really taken Android beyond vanilla. But still, we never use the weather widgets. The small one doesn’t show any forecast, and the big one steals too much space.

We are currently in the midst of designing a suite of Android widgets and have put some thought into the ultimate weather widget, that according to us should:


• Emphasize upcoming weather rather than current
• Offer short term forecasts at a glance (should I bring an umbrella today?)
• Offer long term forecasts with minimum effort (what's the best day this week to go mountainbiking?)
• Stay compact unless specifically interacted with
• Be beautiful and give an aha/wow/smile

Here’s what we came up with:

A compact mode that shows the current and upcoming weather with the same priority. Temperature is color coded to give information at a glance:

An extended mode that shows the weather with a bar representation so that you can easily see how it’s going to vary the following days:

How do you get between these modes?

The widget is 3D so you can swipe to rotate between the modes.For some extra love we’ve added physics, making it even more playful:

Another thing we’re experimenting with is more exotic input methods. Here you blow into the microphone to switch from temperature to wind information:

TAT goes retro with an anaglyphic UI

Remember those nice glasses from the 80’s? Well guess what - now you can use them on your next mobile UI as well.







So if you have a pair of red-green glasses laying around, put them on and enjoy the cool 3D effect in the anaglyphic version of our previously released RedDish demo below – all powered by our astonishing UI framework; TAT Cascades.
























Of course these types of glasses won’t be needed for the new wave of stereoscopic 3D experiences, so stay tuned for more 3D UIs by TAT.



What is anaglyphics?
Anaglyph images are made up of two superimposed color layers that are offset with respect to each other to produce a depth effect. Usually the main subject is in the center, while the foreground and background are shifted laterally in opposite directions. When viewed through 2-color glasses, each eye perceives a slightly different picture. The visual cortex of the brain fuses these into perception of three dimensions.

How to build a coverflow on Android in just 5 minutes

Using TAT Cascades for Android, Fredrik Berglund shows how easy it is to build an attractive coverflow UI on Android in just five minutes, and have it running on a device.


NOTE: Programming section is five minutes, but fast forwarded to 3 minutes

With TAT Cascades for Android and TAT Motion Lab, Fredrik has a really flexible toolset that allows him to check performance directly on target, change design direction at anytime and create a prototype that shows a UI concept with great performance. Working with TAT Cascades makes it possible to actually sketch on device.

Why create a concept movie when you can create a working prototype in the same amount of time?


Did you know this about TAT Cascades for Android?

• TAT Cascades enables the Android framework to be a modern architecture not only to come on par with today's high end UI’s but also to go beyond.

• TAT Cascades provides next generation UI driven approach rather than the programmatic UI in Android

Benefits:
• CTS compliant pre-integration on Android
• Using hardware acceleration to its full extent
• Bleeding-edge user experience, with full support 3D in the UI
• Rapidly scale your Android implementation across other operating systems, such as Windows Mobile, Symbian etc.

Spotify on Symbian, powered by TAT technology

The market for downloadable applications will continue to grow in a rapid pace and for content and service providers’ like Spotify mobile reach is of essence
Despite the hype, the Apple App store only accounts for 13% of the total market for downloadable applications; e.g. Symbian/S60 (Nokia) accounts for 46%.

To make a downloadable application (one version) for the Apple App store is easy,
but when you need to go beyond the App store, more or less everything becomes difficult. TAT can have the downloadable application look astonishingly beautiful on Symbian/S60 and also makes sure that you can port this across different platforms, such as Symbian/S60, Android, Windows Phone and iPhone.



Turning a great internet service into an equally attractive and easy-to-use mobile application that works across platforms such as Symbian is challenging both from a technology and a design perspective. TAT had the software solution and design competence required to meet the high demands of Spotify.

The technology used for Spotify's downloadable music application has for long been used by several of the leading handset manufacturers to create advanced user interfaces across various mobile platforms. Using that same technology to build downloadable applications is a logical step as post-loaded services on mobile devices rapidly expands from iPhones to the much larger total smartphone market.



Check out the press release >>

UIST'09: Relaxed selection techniques for querying time-series graphs

Imagine changing someone's dialect in a sound editor. I have a vision of editing sound in the same powerful way we can edit photos. This research tips the scales a little bit in favour of sound editing. From a song track, you would be able to trace the shape of a vowel, and select all similar vowels across the track. Change every a to e, and you get a weird dialect. Funny.

We're not there yet. But this is one step in the right direction.

Ripples: Utilizing Per-Contact Visualizations to Improve User Interaction with Touch Displays

From UIST 2009.

I like how they turn the dot into a line when you move fast. An elegant way to cope with low framerate systems.

/SLincoln

Microsoft "Courier" secret tablet

Flawless recognition of handwriting. Will it become reality this time around?