The developer diary will be a place for our developers to talk about the pitfalls, gotcha’s, solutions, and technology they’re working on. Sometimes these posts will deal with Ally, sometimes they’ll be completely unrelated, but always (hopefully) insightful.
I wanted to comment today about how screen space has changed in the last few years. Specifically, we live in a horizontal world now, and that just wasn’t the case before. Back in the bad old days of CRTs, the 14 square inches of screen real estate didn’t much care if your UI was laid out horizontal or vertically. However, because people have become so used to vertical text flow in books (I suppose I should say especially people from western cultures), normal UIs were designed vertically oriented. For instance, menu bars always live at the top.
The change to wide format LCDs has made this interesting – I don’t know too many people who keep their start menu on the bottom anymore – the real estate is too valuable. So, as we began to develop one particular part of Harmony (this will be enigmatic until we actually talk about the product), we started with a vertically oriented layout. I felt the aesthetics were better, the flow more understandable, and the UI more disruptive. After early testing with customers, I was patently told off. A vertically oriented layout (for what we were trying to accomplish) was the wrong solution. Since our target customers tend to have big monitors, they were extremely annoyed to be wasting large chunks of screen real estate.
Once we start talking about the product, I’ll refer back to this post and add a little more insight and maybe some prototype screen shots.
Remember, Ally is gearing up for a beta in March, if you’re interested send an email to beta@allysoftware.com.
Print | posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 11:49 AM