03.11.07
Aesthetic usability
ne thing which bothers me is the perceived requirement for h/w acceleration in order to produce all the cool Mac like transition effects on a mobile device. The CPUs and memory supplied in modern smart phones is very generous, and we have seen ports of doom etc running on pretty low end hardware at a decent FPS(frames per second rate). It should be well within the capacity of the CPU to supply some pretty decent transition effects.
I was blown away when I first saw a SGI terminal which not only was used for developing 3D models for industry and the entertainment business, but also used 3D effects in the general operating system UI. I thought that it was criminal use of CPU but I also knew that was my new expectation of what a UI should be and I wanted to use.
I got into graphics in a big way while I was a teenager and spent far too much time implementing and optimizing graphics effects to replicate what I saw on high end machines and even on SNES (they had some h/w rotation and scaling chip). In those days you didn’t have to use openGl just to rotate an object on screen, you wrote tight code, used fixed point arithmetic and look up tables. If you spent a few days thinking about the effect and kept optimising it, you could usually get a pretty decent model of say a page turning, a screen collapse to reveal another etc.
Which brings me to the Nokia NG browser. It’s an impressive demo of what can be achieved on a small device, even though it’s not actually a great experience when reading web pages.
One thing I noticed was the browser back button. Hitting back brings up a carousel effect showing each page in the history on a rotating view which when you step back and forwards through the history zooms the page your on and reduces the size of the one before and after – giving a nice transition for your eye to follow.
It looks pretty nice and a bit iTunes like. But what made me smile was that the carousel does not actually scale the images as it rotates, it simply crops them smoothly as you scroll, giving the illusion of zooming in and out. It took me ages to convince my work colleagues that it wasn’t actually doing any scaling.
I’m not saying that scaling would be a particularly expensive operation but it goes to show that it’s giving the eye something to follow is what gives you the aesthetic usability rather than how it’s implemented.