The last couple of days the battery life on my Windows Phone Mango has been catastrophic. I wasn’t able to last more than 3-4 hours, tops. Then the battery saver icon appeared (battery with a little heart over it) and gave me a couple extra hours, it really is a saver. The only thing that I could think of, that I had changed, was that shuffling the images used as background in pictures hub. So I began to restart, charge, changed settings, disconnected Wi-Fi. I tried all kind of tricks that affects battery life. No luck.

Then I thought that maybe I should stop syncing mail so often and se what effect that would have. When I tried to change my settings I saw how it was syncing mail, lots of mail in my account. It never seem to stop and suddenly it hit me:

I might have set it to sync my All mails folder in my Google mail, and that isn’t a good thing. If it tries to sync all then there is 56 472 conversations dragging around in my Google account (I haven't thrown away any mail, except for spam mail and mailing list, the last 8 years). And even if I narrow this down to the last 7 days it’s a lot of mail to sync in the background. No wonder it was draining the battery. An I was right.

Actually here are a few areas that can improve in the user interface. Doing all this syncing was not good for the performance of the mail application either. I even had trouble to stop the sync of the All mails folder. And while the account was syncing I wasn’t able to remove it or change any settings on it.

In the end I figured that the easiest way to get rid of it all was to just go into flight mode, remove the account and then add it again (after going out of flight mode). This time I made sure it’s just the inbox that is synced. And now all is back to normal again or even better.

So be careful with what you sync or it may really kill the battery on your device.

Touch is great thing, suddenly you can touch, tap, double tap, flick, pinch and stretch to manipulate virtual object. It really revamped the whole mobile business mainly with the release of the iPhone and the capacitive touch screens, used in most smartphones today. But also in the stuff using infrared matrix screens like the Neonode back in 2004 that had quite good gesture control but never took off.

But let the touch stay there in a virtual interface on the screen. We all know and love what we got there. But if you have a real physical nice button DON'T MAKE IT A TOUCH BUTTON. Physical buttons should stay physical, a touch button is actually just an approximation to the real thing. That was cool in the 80-ties. If you really, really, can't help yourself, at least keep them safe from accidental touch. I’ll give you some example from bad to worse …

The new XBOX 360

This device uses touch to open the tray door and for the on/off switch. Its not a big problem here, the XBOX isn’t moved around much and mostly you don’t touch it by accident. But sometimes, you need to move it. I have it hidden away and I was opening the doors and accidently opened the tray. The sound it made when it hit the wall wasn’t too pleasing but it survived.

My stove

This one is even more annoying. The buttons are placed close to where you normally would have physical buttons and it works well when you and navigate them. But there are a few occasions… If you accidentally cover them they start to do all sorts of crazy stuff until the stove, as a security feature, shut down totally. Also, when you have a big handle cover one panel it reacts,  suddenly you wonder what happen until you realize that you have turned off the heat.

My Samsung Omnia 7

This is by far one of the worst examples of touch buttons. It doesn’t provide any functionality other than looks (and I think you could have gotten the same look with real buttons, with the right materials). It is constantly in the way and trying to play a game is almost impossible as you have your whole thumb over the buttons. I nearly thrown this out the window…

Are there any good versions?

Well I think my old Bang&Olufsen sound system from 1991 is ok, touch button is not a killer feature but adds coolness to this piece of machinery, not that I know what I’m going to use my CD-player or cassette deck for anymore

 
B&O 4500 with the military grade remote - could easily take out any enemy

It’s also good in that it’s easy to keep clean, it does not produce any false taps or clicks (being placed on a wall and all). It’s only a design thing using touch here but it doesn’t make it worse, besides, it’s the massive one pound remote that is used to control this…

The stove, again, is actually also a good contender for touch buttons:

Easy to clean

There is one really good reasons for using touch here and it compensates for the problems. It’s so easy to keep clean.

So, a final plea!

I first thought of this when I moved in and started the fight with my stove. Then there was mockups leaks of the Windows Phone 7 HTC models. Then when I got my Samsung Omnia 7 in October. I think this is THE most annoying “feature” of the Omnia. But now there as a bigger threat - the mockups that Nokia made for the new Windows Phone 7 models. Look here:

This is really scary, touch buttons, and even worse than the Samsung Omnia, the home button is also touch here. This is going to drive at least me crazy. So please forget about touch here!

I was trying to figure out what text size to use on the Windows Phone to make it readable. After using the 24” monitor where I get a “big ass” phone, also know as a … pad :),  I realized that it’s not going to work.

So I started out a little quest to find some data around the phone and what dimensions you could expect. However, there are no single specification around from Microsoft, so the actual size of the screen may vary. Searching around web brought very little technical specifications, but you know a few facts: It’s going to be 480x800 pixels, and 16:9 form factor on the screen. So I did a couple of educated guesses and assumed a 3.8” screen. Interesting enough, this told me that it actually is going to have a whopping 240dpi resolution, that's close to a an old laser printer, and in full color – amazing.

So on to the mockup, as soon as I got the dimensions right I started to print out a few pages, checking fonts and sizes (and got a surprise by how small the texts and icons got in the actual size). I used the skin from the emulator as base. Next, I wanted to get a feeling of it in the hand as well, so I started adding some depth. A few minutes later I found myself creating a cut-out paper prototype you see to the right here.

If you like you can cut out some slits  and do a left/right and a top/bottom sliding version. That way you can even use it to user test panoramic and pivot applications as well as that big sliding home screen.

So here it is the Windows Phone 7 series paper prototype, enjoy.

// Håkan Reis

I was trying to make a mockup in Balsamiq for a windows phone 7 series application and thought i needed a few items to get things right. So I started creating the parts needed. The basic phone, with a see through-screen so it's easy to create panoramas to lay behind. The keyboard variants (there are quite a few, default, text, email, web, search and a couple of dialer keyboards) and then a few of the buttons and checkboxes that’s needed. Most buttons are easiest mimicked by using the geometric shape in Balsamiq.

It’s quite heavy with all the details in the keyboards so pick and choose only the controls you need.

So there you are, just download and start using it.

Also cross-posted on my company blog

After three days of the Microsoft Mix10 event the brain tend to overflow. So I sit down at a Starbucks and try to summarize my thoughts before my mind explodes.

It’s easy to get caught up in positive buzz during events like this but I really think Microsoft is doing a lot of things right here with Windows Phone 7 series, the next level of .NET and Silverlight and Internet Explorer 9, among other things. Some of it, I believe, accounts to all the focus on User Experience and the influence that Bill Buxton have on this.

Also if you want to catch any of the sessions most of them are up at the mix10 site already.

Silverlight release pace

This was a big surprise to me; Silverlight 4 is going to be released as early as next month end the release candidate (RC) is out now. I was more in the lines of a beta and the an RC in the summer and a release late 2010. But it seems they try to align and do a big release with .NET 4, VS2010 and Silverlight 4. As a bonus the Pivot control will be in the controls toolkit so that’s going to be fun to play with.

Silverlight 4 Tools RC | .NET 4 RC | VS2010 RC

About the Windows Phone 7 series

The development platform for Windows Phone 7 series was, of course, one of the biggest news on the starting keynote and lot of sessions around it followed. I think they are on the right track with the platform. A few surprises surfaced, like the inclusion of DirectX to utilize HW backed video decoding and the Windows Phone development tools being released for free.

But a few questions and problems surfaced as well, as you can se all over the web it seems they are not including cut & paste and market place being the only application deployment channel. Other things I thought about was:

• How is the user interface is going to perform in right to left markets.
• What the possibilities are to hook in other services, like for example Pandora, to provide music streams for the native Zune player.
• And I still have a few issues with lag in the interface as well as accidental clicks, lets just hope the will get this issues out the door before they release it.

The user experience work that has been put into the new OS is really cool, the decision to remove all chrome and go for a real clean and consistent look is really fresh. And the decision to let the back button work on all levels across the phone, in-applications as well as between was a stroke of genius.

Windows Phone Dev tools | UI Design guidelines

What about HTML 5 and IE 9

It was pretty obvious that they should release some news around Internet Explorer 9 and its take on HTML 5. It is just an early technology preview but I have to say I’m impressed by the results. They did tone down the JavaScript speed issues but quite frankly they were on par with the other browsers and at those speeds it really is less of an issue. What still is an issue is standards, and anything but a 100/100 score on Acid3 is a failure in my eyes.

What they did show was the brilliant work they have done on the GPU acceleration part. This really was amazing 720p HD video streaming on a netbook was blazing fast, they even manage to pump two 720p streams without a glitch, impressive. And rendering HMTL5, CSS3 and SVG with hardware acceleration really looks promising.

If anything it shows that the Internet Explorer team is still in the game and might really get a decent browser out the door.

IE9 platform preview

Expression Blend 4

The things I saw done with blend was quite cool, this tool has come a long way from the first release and is now a potent tool. The tight integration with Adobe was finally in place, just point to the assets and start editing it in Illustrator or Photoshop. What’s more impressive, if I got it right, was that you were able to bind to a text object from the imported Illustrator assets directly to the object in your ViewModel! This really puts design control back into the hands of the designer.

Expression Blend 4 beta

Get real

So what’s left for me now is to find the time to play with all these new toys and and experience for myself what they are capable of before it’s time to Get Real and start creating.

Have fun // Håkan Reis

Just backing up the last stuff on my computer before shutting down. Checking the flight plan once more and packing the last items. Tomorrow I’ll get up early to catch a plane to Las Vegas and Mix10. This is really going to be fun. Especially I look forward to the HaaHa show, the key note, and of course the stuff on Windows Phone 7 Series (still a really bad name).

Of course its not that bad that its in Las Vegas, but well that’s just a bonus. You could of course expect some kind of report here from my visit when I had some time to digest the impressions.

See you // Håkan Reis

We are deep in the planning of the next Øredev and boy is it going to be good. The full program will be shown shortly but I thought I should give you a few teasers. There will be a full day of UX tracks, among the the session you find titles like Tap is the new click and GUIDe for Saving Face: Developing Killer GUIs with Agile Methods. We are very proud to have all of the speakers with us but a couple names will be revealed shortly.

But the full day of sessions is not all we will have a fun filled day with UX workshops as well. Covering both rich internet application design and gestural and multi touch design with two really great workshop speakers.

More to be announced really soon, be sure to watch the Øredev site for the full program.

// Håkan Reis