Juan Sanchez

If you have an iPad you know that on the lockscreen there’s a button you can tap to turn your iPad into a digital picture frame. I was thinking, why limit it to just pictures? What if you could turn the iPad into a jukebox, clock display, etc. right from the lockscreen? Here’s a mock up:

Menu to select iPad Lockscreen Options.

Basically, instead of tapping the picture icon, there would be a more universal icon. When you tap on that you would see a popover with options for apps that support the lockscreen. These would be optimized views that did very specific things. For example, selecting “iPod” would shuffle songs like a jukebox, like this:

The iPod App as a Lockscreen

Other examples

Any app could be packaged with the optimized lockscreen view. These views would do one thing and provide no options besides switching to another lockscreen version of an app (and unlocking your iPad). Here’s some other examples:

QlockTwo – This is a typographic clock app. It would be awesome to be able to have this as an option and run as a clock on my desk while I’m not using my iPad.

Twitterific – This could show your tweet stream, but I think that might be a little extreme. It could show a single tweet from your tweet stream or maybe display your tweet stream in a different way that didn’t feel overwhelming.

This Day in History – Display a single view with a list of things that happened this day in history or maybe cycle through different events for that occurred on that day.

Dictionary.com – Could show the word of the day or cycle through a different word every hour.

Sure, something like this shortens the life of your monitor cause your screen would be on a lot more. Still, I thought it was worth mocking up.

You can see the images in higher resolution on my Flickr page.