Video Concept: Expose For iPhone App Screens

Swedish design firm Ocean Observations has created this interesting mock-up of an Exposé-like feature for the iPhone.

In this mock-up, hitting the iPhone’s home button brings up an overview of all the device’s screenloads of apps; just tap one to jump straight to it.

It’s a nicely made concept – I like the inclusion of a search box at the top – but I’m not sure it would be workable. For one thing, any more than nine screens of apps would be difficult to display; and as some commenters point out, at such tiny resolution it might still be hard to find the app you wanted.

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That said, I’m still not keen on the idea of “pages” of apps, and having tried to manually re-arrange them in iTunes 9, I’m more convinced than ever that trying to keep them in some kind of order is a waste of time. You’re better of depending on the built-in search function added in 3.0. But that’s worth explaining in a post of its own, which I’ll publish in a day or so.

9 comments »

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Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in iPhone, News |

Fen Tiger
Looks like a solution in search of a problem to me
http://themacadvocate.com TheMacadvocate
Interesting ideaâ€š but it won’t see the light of day. If you have 9 pages of appsâ€š it takes you marginally more time to flip through them page by page. If you have moreâ€š the icons would be unreadable in expose mode; you’d have to add another expose pageâ€š which would kind of defeat the purpose.
Barry Wood
I like the idea. It’s nice to be able to jump tot the first page now with the button but it is a pain to get to an app a six pages over. I could see this speeding things up.
If you have more than nine pages of apps it could be set up so that you can swipe to the side and see the next group of pages.
http://www.oceanobservations.com Ocean Observations
We imagine that for more than nine pages, the thumbnails could shrink even further in size. It would work the other way around as well. So if you have fewer pages, the thumbnails would be larger.
But this being a concept, we used nine pages as it is more visually appealing.
The video is scaled to 80% of the original size, so you would have slightly more details in an actual implementation.
fred
The iPhone “Finder” still needs lots of work. I would like to see a list mode and I would like to see categories that I can click though like the Palm OS has had for 10 years. This swiping stuff is driving me bonkers. Plus, what is the limitation of screens? This is so Mac128.
Samuel Herschbein
IMHO this is exactly what’s needed, I’d love not to have to swipe 10 times to get to the rightmost page. I have all my pages loaded with apps, currently over 140 3rd party. Given that there are 11 pages now, I suggest Apple goes to 12 pages and the layout changes to 3×4 (won’t look as nice…).
http://ongodesign.com David
I think this is an excellent direction… and if the user has more than 9 pages, you would be able to scroll the Expose screen until you tap a page. I think it’s an alternate intuitive way to access distant pages more easily.
http://www.tumbleintopeace.com CB
Ultra-cool! I want this!
GermanBrot
It would work better if used with “Catagories” app… then the 9 thumbnails would just display “Games” and “Utilities” and etc as folders… so instead of 9 micro pages, you see 9 “Folders” of the types of apps to jump into… you can quickly memorize where “Utilities” is evertime, but when you dl something from the app store… its always placed randomly.
If only apple could cataloge its own items… then when you dl everything… it would auto populate into the corresponding folders. Who knows… maybe even have the “zoom” feature for subfolders.