| Thursday, March 12, 2009 |
05:44 - Ask and you shall receive
|
(top) |
JMH sends a couple of links related to the recent Ebay leak of prototype iPhones with prerelease interfaces:
What If the iPhone Got Invented in 1990?
I like how the matte screen looks. And definitely, I love how fast this thing is. The Interface icons are fugly, but the combination of colors and the rounded buttons remind me of the computer consoles in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not bad at all. Actually, someone should try something like that for real: A total ST:TNG makeover of the iPhone interface.
And a day later:
I saw your call for a total ST:TNG makeover of the iPhone, and wanted to show you (and the world) mine! It is not completely designed by me, others started the work and I just continued it, or combined several existing models.
I then ported it to winterboard and added my own mods here and there, like the LCARS calculator and SBSettings, as well as sounds and an animated background to make the whole thing look cooler! I even ported the Enterprise's computer font—Swiss911, used for the Library Computer Access/Retrieval System's interface—to the iPhone.
It's like a cruel prank in some ways, because the Trek:TNG console system is famously one of the worst possible forms of interface design: tall skinny illegible fonts (probably intentional, because they want the stuff on the screen to sort of fade into the background and not distract from the plot and acting, even though those things are far less interesting), pointless swooshing solid-color geometric shapes subdividing the screen for no reason, and input systems involving five or six unlabeled colored buttons arranged in random patterns like the little blob-shaped buttons on a car keyfob. It's the philosophical opposite of the iPhone interface in just about every conceivable way.
And yet you gotta give props to this kind of creativity...
|
|
Brian Tiemann
