On Monday, Leap Motion wowed technology enthusiasts with a video of its new gesture-control platform. The video showcased a system of incredible speed and precision, but controlled demos can sometimes oversell a technology’s real-world capabilities.

Would the Leap 3-D gesture device disappoint us during a real-world hands-on? No — far from it. We were somewhat surprised to discover the Leap is everything portrayed in the Leap Motion video. You can see everything we observed in our own video below.

A WPF enthusiast on twitter is building an application. They noticed that the images they were using looked like crap in the toolbar. We checked, and it wasn't an issue of SnapToDevicePixels or UseLayoutRounding. Nope, this was something else. So I asked him to send me the whole project. Turns out the tiny toolbar images are actually 512x512 32 bit PNGs. While resizing those should definitely be on the To Do list for this app, depending on how the images are used, I thought I'd at least figure out how to fix the display.

This video will show you simple methods for taking the idea for your next app, and getting it on paper. From there, you can utilize various software to make your prototype a reality. Adobe Illustrator ªªhttp://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html isºº one solution for this. Other tools used in the video are Balsamiq ªªhttp://www.balsamiq.com/ andºº Inkscape http://inkscape.org/.

Be sure to check out the Nokia Icon Toolkit ªªhttp://nokia.ly/Aj0pR8 forºº some ready-made icons you can use in your app. With the Visual design stencilsªªhttp://nokia.ly/w5hqIO youºº can easily sketch how your app would look like.

This template is most useful if your logo or icon graphic consists of a single basic shape. The template includes a canvas in the correct icon size, a 96 x 96 pixel bounding box, focal zone guides, the Symbian Colour Spectrum and several precast background layers with the surround shapes of Symbian launcher icons. You can simply paste your graphic or glyph on top of the surround background shape of your choice, add the inner shadow, and save the icon as an SVG file. See the video.

Harmattan icon generator

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

Qt Quick Components provides ready made building blocks to develop great looking Graphical User Interfaces for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.
The aim of this article is to introduce developers with this components, possible usages and code samples. Thus acting as a quick starter.

However before I jump in, a couple disclaimers. First, I am a 3rd year undergraduate software engineering student. I interned on the Android team, and +Romain Guy who was responsible for much of the hardware acceleration work in Honeycomb, reviewed some of my code, but I was not on the framework team and I never read the Android rendering source code. I do not have any authoritative Android knowledge and I cannot guarantee what I say here is necessarily 100% accurate, but I have done my best to do my homework.

Second, I’m interning with the Windows Phone team starting in January, so it’s possible that this post will be unconsciously biased against Android, but if you ask any of my friends, it’s really hard to shut me up about Android. I have more Android t-shirts than days of the week and I’d rather give away my Macbook than my Nexus S. The Googlplex is like a second home - I’ve slept there on more than a few occasions to the dismay of startled janitors (and if you ever get a chance to visit, the banana french toast at Big Table Cafe is to die for). If anything, I’m probably biased in Android’s favor.

This list contains links to various information sources useful for (not only) Harmattan development.

When Nokia came out with MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan they released some Nokia specific APIs so that all applications that run on their phones could have the same outer look and feel. The way they pulled this off was introduce Page, PageStack, PageStackWindow and PageStackWindowStyle elements.

I know there are a few users that might prefer no transition animations at all, thinking it’s unnecessary eye candy. I prefer with the eye candy, so in this update, I think some of the transitions are a little too fast for me (i.e. it’s almost non-existent in rotation, so looks too sudden, but that’s just me). In other places it looks well improved.

Here’s the instructions on what to do.

I love the magically mundane virtual real world of Google Streetview, and like others I’ve longed for my 15 frames of blurry low-res Street View fame. So I’ve been wondering, how can I get into Street View without having to stalk the car and chase it down? Actually, I don’t just want to appear in Street View, I want to play in it and add things to it too. And I want to be able to invite my friends to join me on the street. I want to use Street View for more than looking at a random piece of the past. I want to use Street View as a place to make alternative presents and possible futures.

Sorry if that's harsh, but I'm with John Gruber: These spit-polished masterpieces of magical thinking are the tech-elite version of LOLcat videos. They make you feel warm and fuzzy for a minute or two and...that's about it. As Gruber scathingly puts it, "We've seen Minority Report already. Imagine if [Microsoft] instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today."

On behalf of the team, I want to thank everyone for their active engagement on the Start screen blogs over this past week. We have been following all of the comments and responding as much as we can. We know major changes like this can be controversial and we are looking forward to continuing this dialog with you. I wanted to address some of the specific topics that have been brought up so far as they pertain to the design. I know this doesn’t address all of your questions, but rest assured that we are listening and will be continuing this ongoing conversation.

Collection of iOS UI patterns

Casey’s Contraptions came out for iPad only in May. Since then, you and your partner in crime have been working on making it run on the iPhone. That’s 3 months for those of you counting. So what has taken this long? Wasn’t it a straight port? Lots of shared code? Just shrink the images and go? Well…

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

CJ from ZOMGitsCJ found a video on vimeo about Nokia’s 8 perspective on design.

Watch to see the processes that goes into designing a Nokia phone.

The formula for the perfect game may be an area of hot discussion, but most would argue that games that are easy to get into and difficult to put down goes along the right lines. Players' early experience of a game is critical: this is the period in which they're making up their minds whether to devote more time, and often money, to the rest of it. 

So how do we make games with a polished early experience? Let's take some lessons from a game which I think does it incredibly well, PopCap's Plants Vs Zombies. 

Games are made of verbs. Run, jump, punch, crouch. Hand held controllers are able to simulate the input of the player to use those verbs in a rather precise way, be it on/off or analog. And as developers, designing around verbs is a pretty straightforward affair which we have been doing since the first game was played. But when it gets to adverbs, the emotional variables of a verb, neither the controller or developer seems to be aware of what to do with them beyond pure visuals.

Enter motion controls. While initially it is the verbs we assign to the gestures, such as swing a sword, we quickly find out that they just don’t quite match up the crisply defined input of a controller.  Motion Controls also lack a tactile sense of feedback in many cases, making all those verbs feel hollow when we don’t feel the physical reaction. It is a fun gimmick, but we quickly grow tired of the theatrics and plug our plastic hands back into the machine.

So if verbs aren’t best used for motion controls, how can we use them as adverbs and adjectives?

Everything I ever needed to know about animation, I learned from watching Looney Tunes.

Seriously.

Sure, I went to school. I learned HOW to animate there and from other sources, but none of that taught me what I needed to know about animation as much as watching Bugs outsmart Elmer, Daffy play the second banana, Foghorn Leghorn fumble about, or Wile E. Coyote fall to yet another demise.

Games are becoming more Web-like, and the Web is becoming more game-like. If you need proof of this, you have only to look at Yahoo Answers. Random questions are posed, the top answer is chosen, and credibility points are given to the winner. It’s a ranking system that accumulates and unlocks more and more features within the system. It works because of the psychology of achievement and game mechanics and thus encourages interaction. This raises the question, what can a Web designer learn from games, or — more specifically — video games?

Just like we did with the original MeeGo handset UI deep dive back in June in last year, we’re back again with an up close and personal look at the user interface and usage paradigm running on the lovely N9. For the curious among us, Nokia have provided an extensive consumer facing page to demo the N9 over at swipe.nokia.com and a more technical/developer focused page for those that care for a little more detail and less “shiny”.

Fat fingers and compact smartphone screens just aren’t a good match. Combine a few key misses with a well-meaning auto-correction feature and it’s no wonder that “I ate the hummus” turns into “I ate the humans.” But Windows Phone 7 users find that their keyboards seem to have a better knack for knowing what they intend to type—or even what they intend to say.

During Lift 11 in Geneva, researchers from Nokia Research Center Lausanne organized a co-creation workshop with a small group of conference participants.

The session focused on understanding how the contextual insights of users could contribute to the evolution of the mobile user experience

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

Zane emailed us a very thorough article from The Register which described the necrotic core at Nokia. It reads to me that through mismanagement, failures were leading to a death of Nokia from the inside.

This will surely anger Symbian fans. I’m sure what ever Nokia does, media will perceive it as an awful thing. Nokia on Symbian? “Oh that’s awful, they should get rid of it”. Nokia not on Symbian “Oh that’s awful, why did they get rid of it”.

When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was abandoning its development of its own smartphone platforms and APIs, and betting the farm on somebody else's, many people asked why it was necessary.

Nokia had spent 15 years trying to develop and maintain its own software, which it regarded as strategic to maintaining its independence. Elop's decisions have ensured that Nokia didn't just get another option to run alongside its own, but it would abandon these, writing off the investments it had already made. In his opinion, these weren't good enough.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

You must be living under the rock to not to have noticed something called CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is happening in Las Vegas right now and something that has the bloggers sphere excited about is Android 3.0 aka “honeycomb” the tablet version of Android. It certainly is impressive from the videos we have seen. We instantly thought about the MeeGo tablet UI and started comparing. So what we where curious about was what you preferred and why. Of course the MeeGo UI is pre- alpha and the Android 3.0 is only a sneak peak. But we are still interested what your first impressions are when comparing the two.

If you check out this link you’ll see a flash presentation of a MeeGo tablet UI from Evolve III Maestro’s Slate, you” see something quite beautiful.

The MeeGo Maestro Slate from Evolve III has an interactive panoramic homescreens full of non-restricted widgets, Swipe up for apps, Swipe down for multitasking/notifications. There’s also album art cover flow style, and very neat photo viewing options with normal thumbnail, perspective and bottom bar thumbnails.

What I’ll be showing you is how to have perfect working web forms with stunning visuals to produce the desired form for you every time!

I’ll be taking you through the core principles, and making your web forms stand out from the rest! At the end of it all you can see many examples of stunning web forms across the net.

As I've said before, good UI and readable, maintainable code don't mix. But lately I've been inspired to revisit this topic, because it's an idea that has been popping up in other venues as well

Kinect is a new video game system that is fully controlled by bodily movements. It's vaguely similar to the Wii, but doesn't use a controller (and doesn't have the associated risk of banging up your living room if you lose your grip on the Wii wand during an aggressive tennis swing).

Kinect observes users through a video camera and recognizes gestures they make with different body parts, including hands, arms, legs, and general posture. The fitness program, for example, is fond of telling me to "do deeper squats," which it can do because it knows how my entire body is moving. Analyzing body movements in such detail far exceeds the Wii's capabilities, though it's still not going to put my trainer down at the gym out of work.

I'm primarily a server programmer, but I still end up doing UI work every once in a while, and that's been true for the majority of the last three weeks. Not being an experienced old hand at UI design, I find myself falling back on first principles and decade-old books. I'm mostly happy with the results, but the code that results in implementing the interface... well, it's not the kind of code that I like to write.

The goal of a software product is to serve human beings. A good software product caters to the user’s whims, even if it means doing something hard and technically complicated just to save the user one click while he is watching pictures of lolcats. The way a good software product treats the user is kind of like the way a butler treats his master

One of my first icon projects for Campaign Monitor was to create a set of Apple iOS icons for our mobile web application. These are the icons that show up when you bookmark our mobile site to the ‘home screen’ on your Apple device. Now, with all of the iOS devices floating around out there, you can do things the easy way by creating one large icon which is then scaled down for that particular device, or you can do it properly by creating a pixel-perfect icon for each device. For the iPod Touch/iPhone 2.5/3G/3GS, the icon size is a miserly 57 pixels square. For the iPad, it’s 72 pixels square, and for the newer iPhone4, it’s a whopping 114 pixels square.

First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (”interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again.

While cleaning up yesterday, I found some old sketch books. Some of then are from the era I was working on Zen Bound and early incarnation of Recast.

I thought I'd collect some sketches and screenshots how the Zen Bound level selection tree came to be and put them in a rough timeline. It was really hard process for many reasons. The total time span across about half a year, so many at many times we were diving in muddy waters. Now in retrospect it looks quite a bit more coherent process.

Schnelles Prototyping durch Drag&Drop, komplett klickbare Wireframes, Usability Testing und effiziente Kommunikation im Team - das sind die Möglichkeiten von pidoco°!