Top stories

Journalists Cover Microsoft, Using Macs

It’s not an easy time for Microsoft — with Steve Ballmer having to field questions about being “buffoons” and an “evil empire”  at the shareholder’s meeting (.doc) — so when they get together “the world’s most influential technology pundits and online writers” (nb: we weren’t invited) for Mobius to discuss super-secret mobile tech you’d think [...]

Guide To Black Friday Apple Bargains: Cheap MacBooks, iPods and Accessories Galore

Here’s a guide for finding the best bargains on Apple-related gear during the infamous Black Friday sales on November 27. We’ve compiled a comprehensive list of gear from leaked photos of sales flyers and descriptions of sales.
The bargains include a 2.26 GHz MacBook + $150 gift card at Best Buy for $999.99 ; a 32GB [...]

Review: Voices Is Today’s Best Thing Ever, Grab It Now While It’s Cheap

New on the App Store is Voices from the clever folk at Tap Tap Tap. You can guess what it does.

Open it up, pick a silly voice. Helium is pretty silly. A microphone appears and the app even clears your throat for you (try it, you’ll see what I mean). Now speak your brains, and [...]

Review: Sony Walkman S540 Series Video MP3 Player

Press releases, you will hardly be surprised to hear, are rarely very interesting. But one arrived in my inbox a couple of weeks ago that made me double-take.
“Sony’s S Series Walkman,” it chattered, “is a serious challenger to the iPod Nano.” Gosh, really? Perhaps the Cult had better have a look at one, then, despite [...]

Video Concept: Expose For iPhone App Screens

20091005-concept.jpg

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.

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.

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

Email the author | Read more posts by Giles Turnbull.

9 comments

    Looks like a solution in search of a problem to me

    Interesting idea‚ but it won’t see the light of day. If you have 9 pages of apps‚ it takes you marginally more time to flip through them page by page. If you have more‚ the icons would be unreadable in expose mode; you’d have to add another expose page‚ which would kind of defeat the purpose.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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…).

    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.

    Ultra-cool! I want this!

    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.

Add your comment

Name(Required)

Mail (required, but not published)

Website

Comment

Buy Inside Steve's Brain Buy from Amazon.com Buy from Barnes & Noble