Similar web UI experience as we see on Windows Phone 7 - windows-phone-7

I like Windows Phone 7's interface experience. I find it very innovative compared to other interfaces (be it mobile, desktop or web). Yet it's still no less usable. All in all a very good shift from the usual in the right direction.
Some of the effects could be used in web interfaces to enhance the experience without sacrificing usability and intuitiveness.
Effects I'm talking about:
perspective animation when you click on a particular hub on the home screen)
elements executing animation in different times (hub being clicked moves last)
horizontal slide with different slide amounts (titles and background images move less than screen width which gives it a feeling of depth dimension)
etc.
2 questions
Do you know of any public website that uses at least one of the aforementioned effects and does that without the use of plugins (like Flash or Silverlight)?
Is there any JavaScript library that would provide such effects (at least the different delay and different amount sliding technique)?
Extremely simplified example
I've taken some time to put up a simplified example of transition effect that could be adopted on mobile devices and simulates at least a bit of the fine Windows Phone 7.x transitions.
Just click on any tile and see others zoom out and slide to left.
Let me know what you think about this example.
Something came out just these days
Take a look at this HTML demo written by Microsoft (or one of its partners). Blew my mind away as being the closest to WP7 experience! Amazing!

The delay and sliding should be easily handled by jQuery, but I am not aware of someone who has alredy bundled up something to directly emulate the WP7 interface. Sounds like a fun project.

Related

How to adapt text and/or elements size while designing to smaller screens?

I have a personal project designed for the desktop that I previously created in Adobe XD, and now I would like to put it on Behance. To do so, I need to adapt the layout, designed for the desktop, to mobile.
I don't usually design for smaller screens, so I am wondering how much I need to decrease text and element sizes? For example, if I have a text with a font size of 40px, what calculations should I use to decrease the size for mobile? Is there a default percentage to reduce desktop values? Alternatively, are there visual rules that other designers follow?
I always design for Bootstrap, but I'm not sure if I am thinking about mobile the right way.
I've also posted this on the User Experience Stack Exchange forum, but I'm not sure which one is the best for my question.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and advice.
I have designed mostly for desktops as a traditional web designer, and now I'm trying to migrate to UI/UX.
Modern devices do most of the scale conversion work for you by adequately scaling the viewport to compensate for the smaller screens and often higher resolutions. Depending on the type of application you are designing, the technology is different, but the result is very similar.
For example, if you were implementing the design for the Web, you would likely need to use browser features like media queries to manage your content.
However, because you are focusing on the design of the site, you should not need to worry about the 'how', so you can focus on what to do.
Here are some tips:
Elements and text appear roughly the same size on desktop and mobile if you hold the device at a casual but comfortable distance and compare it to the size it appears on your desktop's screen at an average viewing distance. You can try this by going to a website built for mobile like Apple's.
Because of the similar size but reduced screen dimensions, you need to simplify your design, avoid multiple columns (especially for phones).
Because you see a smaller portion of your design at once on mobile, there is less need for significant visual hierarchy. For example, if you have multiple heading levels with a significant visual size difference on the desktop, you can probably get away with making them closer in size on mobile.
If you want to see what your design looks like on mobile, try emailing the design to your phone, save it to your pictures, and load the image full screen. You may need to zoom the image in a bit so that the left and right of the design are touching the sides of your phone's screen. If your text looks too small or your elements are too large, adjust the design and load it on your phone again. Keep doing this until you get it right.
With a little practice and effort, you will get the hang of Mobile design. And, if you want to take it to the next level, try researching mobile first design. Here is just one of many articles on the subject.

Changing how windows displays using Win API?

While I have some experience with the WinAPI I do not have a ton, so I have a question for people who do have much experience in it. My question concerns what the limit of our power is. Can we change how windows fundamentally displays?
For example, can I cause windows to render a screen size bigger than the display and pan across it, kind of like workspaces but without separation? Can I apply distortion to the top and bottom of the screen? If distortion is not possible can I have an application mirror what windows is displaying with very little delay?
The biggest question I have is the first one, because if I can make windows render virtual workspaces and pan seamlessly between them then I figure it is possible to make a separate application which handles the distortion on a mirrored image of the desktop. Again, apologies for the vague questions, but I really want to know if we are able to do this stuff, at least in theory, before I dive deep into learning more on the API. If the WinAPI does not allow it is there another way to do this kind of stuff in Windows?
EDIT: Some clarification. What I want to do is basically extend the desktop to a very large size (not sure on exact size yet), both vertically and horizontally. Section the large desktop into workspaces of a specific size which can seamlessly be transitioned across and windows moved across. It would transition workspaces based on a head tracking device and/or mouse movement. Note that when I say workspaces this could be achieved by zomming in and then panning the zoom as well. I also need to be able to distort the screen, such as curving the edges, and render the screen twice. That is the bare minimum of what I am wanting to do.
Yes, you can. The most feasible way I come up with is using a virtual graphics driver (like what Windows Remote Desktop does, which creates a virtual graphics card and a virtual display). Sadly you will lose the ability to run some programs needing advanced graphics API (such as 3D games, 3D modelling tools or so).
There're some examples:
http://virtualmonitor.github.io/
https://superuser.com/questions/62051/is-there-a-way-to-fake-a-dual-second-monitor
And remember Windows has a limit on display resolution (for each and for altogether). I don't remember the exact number but it should be less than 32768*32768.

Which dialog spacing conforms to Windows UI/UX guidelines?

We are implementing a Windows 7 application that displays a pop-up in the taskbar's notification area.
There are two version of the simple form.
and the compact version:
Which one is closer to Windows's UI guidelines? Is there a good reason to prefer one over the other?
The second one looks better to me. It's hard to put my finger on the exact difference between them, but it looks like there's more horizontal padding between the borders on the first one.
That's not consistent with the standard UI or the sample pictures in Microsoft's handy UI documentation/guidebook.
For example, there's very little horizontal (or vertical) padding in these two notification area pop-ups:
The standard border padding for windows (according to Microsoft's UX guidelines) is 7 DLUs (about 12 pixels) all the way around. When in doubt, I suggest using that.
Beyond the UI/UX guidelines, it's also important to consider functionality. A pop-up window should not take up the entire screen, so using space as parsimoniously as possible is always a good idea. Since the extra padding doesn't really add anything to or make your dialog more usable, it's superfluous.

Performance issues with the TransitioningContentControl in Windows Phone 7

When using the TransitioningContentControl and a Panorama, I cannot seem to get any good performance when I am navigating from one page to another.
I have been implementing a basic Flip animation, where the current content gets flipped out and the new one is flipped in, but the apps FPS drops to less than 20FPS which means you never get to see the first half of the animation, which is a real pain...
How can I ensure that the animations runs so that the phone can handle the transition?
I dont think its my panorama, its not that full of stuff...
Is this on the emulator or on an actual device? From what i've heard, depending on your hardware, the CPU performance is better on the emulator, but the graphics performance can be much better on an actual device.
Are you transitioning to to the panorama or from the panorama? If you're transitioning to it, can you "delay load" the content of the panorama items' lists?

Drawing on top of every windows on X11

I am trying to make an arcade machine. The user will purchase credits, which will allow him to play for X minutes. I want to write "9:42 minutes left" at the left corner of the screen, even if he's playing a full screen game (UrbanTerror, for example).
I would really like if I could do this with Ruby, but any other language is OK. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance.
A good example of such an application is XOSD.
Problem is, that will probably fail over any GLX context, which is what fullscreen games like Urban Terror work with. Even if it would draw, the game will overdraw it almost instantly, so the best thing you would get is heavy flicker.
Probably you are better off with a cheap hardware solution, like a small secondary display (there are some USB 7" displays out there) or a LCD device. I would even claim that's good for usability.
Perhaps this is of help for you, but I don't know whether it works for several applications and fullscreen mode applications:
http://doc.trolltech.com/3.3/opengl-x11-overlays.html
The idea is to use a special overlay capability of the graphics card, which is typically used for popup windows. Perhaps you can create such an overlay at the topmost level and it will also work in fullscreen -- perhaps not.

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