Paul Whitaker says,
I want widgets. I want widgets that are similar to what I have on my lovely new Mac.
Great idea – I think of these as single purpose applets that are easy to figure out and do their job extremely well. Only thing for me is the UI. With a large screen, it’s easy to pepper the desktop with widgets or to find them quickly with Exposé. But what about a phone?
Microsoft was the first to have an active idle screen. Sendo put it first on Series 60 with their Sendo X. With the Nokia 6680 (Series 60 2.6?), there is now an active screen on all of Nokia’s newer phones too.
But, is it extensible? Can I write an app that registers info on the active idle, as does the calendar and to-do list? Then I could see having a line up of widgets I could scroll through somehow to get weather info, ticker tape of news and such, status of my whatever, and so on.
Uh, I think Paul could actually answer that better than I.
Also, I didn’t know Paul had a blog. Shouldn’t be a surprise. He’s an interesting dude. I had the good fortune to meet him a long time ago.
Why do phone’s differentiate between people, web sites, applications, widgets etc. Integration through fundamental UI reform makes it simple. A single place to access my network (see Paul Goldings Buddy Paradigm post) and to see notifications of activity. A good search facility to fast find the one I want. An end to handheld, application centric UI’s.
Current contact search-as-I-type is probably good enough to find “Weather”. It can be enhanced to become smarter and incorporate tags and indexes.
Of course on an integrated phone speed-dial can launch an app or widget instead of dialling.
My point is that much of what I look for, I look for in an opportunistic way and I would like a solution that serves that need and the quality and dependabitlity of the solution would require a larger business system behind it. Widgets, as they function on a mac, are a good example of serving that need. All you have to do is hit the F12 key and a small set of information important to you is right there. Obviosly you can’t run a dozen widgets on small phone screens.
Agreed. Finding a simple and elegant way to display and discover what can be loosely call data services will rapidly extend the take up of these services by the mass market that will never download a Java or Symbian app. I think Widgets on the mac handle the display well, but don’t integrate discovery into the same environment. Discovery is critical to being able to generate a business in new widgets or data feeds