I’m trying a little experiment called HomeShelf. It’s basically a Tumblog that is dedicated to sharing images you can use for your iPhone’s Homescreen wallpaper that makes it look like shelves. I’ve made the first one based on the iBooks shelves, but there’s plenty of room for more creativity. Check it out won’t you? HomeShelf
As I’ve been working with the iPad I’ve been intrigued by some of the UI differences between it and the iPhone. One of the first things you notice when playing with the iPad is the popovers that display in context of the element you’ve interacted with. On an iPhone, the same interaction would take you to a new view.
This got me thinking about how popovers might be used outside of applications and in the homescreens where your app icons live. Specifically, I was thinking of how I could use popovers to peek at specific content from an app instead of launching the entire application. For example, peek at recent emails, see what AIM buddies are online, etc.
Sure I could fire up the application and navigate to the information I’m interested in, but I’m lazy and am not interested in doing that. So, here’s some mockups of what I’m thinking. The popover could be displayed by double-tapping the app icon.
Peeking at Twitterific to see only recent tweets
Peek at AIM to see who's online
See what the current weather is like
The person who creates the app can dictate what shows up in the Peek functionality of the app, but the goal would be to have a minimal amount of interactivity. Otherwise, what’s the point? The user could just launch the application.
It would also be important to keep content to a minimum. For example, don’t show an entire Twitter stream, just show the most recent tweets. Maybe even limit it and have the option to see more tweets that launches the app.
Customization of each Peek view might be interesting, but it may not be necessary. For example, setting Twitterific to show recent replies versus recent tweets.
When you think about it, this feature mimics in some ways the Dashboard in OS X. So, if these views are already created, why not have a Dashboard app on the iPad?
To add these Peek views as widgets to the Dashboard app you could drag the icons onto the Dashboard app icon similar to the way folders work in iPhone OS 4. The only difference would be that the Peek views appear in the Dashboard now and the actual apps themselves don’t leave the homescreen.
Like any quickly executed idea I’m sure there’s flaws in this, but I thought it’d be fun to mock up. You can see the full resolution mockups on my Flickr page.
Now I’m bummed about buying a new computer because I can clearly do everything I need on an iPhone.
These are my links for February 8th through February 14th:
These are my links for February 4th through February 8th:
These are my links for January 31st through February 3rd:
This looks like an awesome eBook reader. Sounds like the company who makes this app is going to be bringing textbooks to Apple’s iPad too.
via Iceberg Reader.
via UrbanOutfitters.com.
via Uncrate.
