It seems the screens we shared of an alternative home screen for the iPhone created some buzz. We had no intention of taking it any further than a blog post but we figured this was something worth seeing through.

We got in touch with Jay Freeman a.k.a saurik. He’s the guy behind Cydia, an application for jailbroken iPhones that allows you to browse and download apps outside of actual app store. He’s crazy smart, passionate and geeky — three things we love here at T+L. Jay is going to be instrumental in making this happen.

If you haven’t already figured it out, getting this on your phone will require you to jailbreak it. That may not be an appealing option for many, but for the 2 million plus out there who have already done it and for those that are comfortable with doing it, this can be a reality.

The app and the underlying technology to make it happen are still in development so what comes out the other side will differ from what we originally proposed. The biggest change will initially be that it will render only on the lock screen. We went down this road for a number of reasons, primarily because of its relative ease of implementation, though there’s nothing easy about it. Jay is creating a framework to write custom lock screens called Cydget. Our concept will act as the guinea pig.

No word on an actual release date yet due to a last minute crash bug, but from what we hear it’s not far off. We’ll make an official announcement once it’s available. You can follow @teehanlax @gteehan and @saurik if you’re looking for more detail since we tend to tweet about this stuff more frequently than we blog about it.

Had the opportunity to attend this month’s Torchi event, featuring two guests from Microsoft. Lisa Anderson, MS Surface User Experience Director, talked about the fundamental shift from command line interfaces to GUIs, to what she called Natural User Interfaces (NUIs, I guess). Some really cool theoretical thinking in her presentation but it would have also been nice to get into a more concrete discussion about where they’re headed with Surface. I guess we’ll just have to wait for the SDK and interface guidelines spec. Lisa talked about how they’re trying to make the interface “disappear” by leveraging intuition and allowing interaction through direct manipulation. But there must be at least some standardized interface elements built into the Surface and I’m really keen to learn what these are and how they work.

Jansen Harris’ discussion about his work heading up the Office User Experience Team was also really interesting and much more concrete. No matter how you feel about Microsoft’s past performance when it comes to innovating the user experience, it’s hard to deny that they did a great job with the latest Office suite (and this has been borne out both critically and in terms of revenues generated). 3 things Jansen mentioned that stuck with me:

1. Early-on they established a set of design tenets to guide decisions at a high level over the course of the project. One that really stood out to me was “Straight-forward is better than clever.” I know I’ve often been guilty of breaking that rule :)


2. Developers took the first couple of months basically rebuilding the programatic foundations for Office specifically so that the UX team could afford to make mistakes and revise as they progressed along.


3. The Office 2007 team was comprised entirely of people who passionately believed in the project. If your heart wasn’t in it (and there were apparently those who fundamentally disagreed with the idea that MS could or should re-engineer the UX for Office), they found something else in the company for you to work on.

In general, I was impressed by how much grunt-work the team put into validation and evaluation throughout the design process. Rather than testing for testing’s sake or gathering data just to justify pre-ordained decisions, they used evidence to answer very focused, well-defined questions.

Quick plug: ToRCHI events happen monthly and are usually worth coming out to. Great guests and good discussion.

Available for pre-order today the new Adobe Creative Suite boasts a ton of new features across all platforms, however in this post I’ll only highlight a couple… Read the rest of this entry »