HP's webOS platform: An Introduction to the webOS 2.0 UI

Article Description: The rebirth of the--webos 2.0 UI introduction.

February 10, Hewlett-Packard launched its first flat touchpad, while also releasing the pre 3 and veer two handsets. These devices are equipped with the webOS system. HP says it will apply the webOS operating system to all devices, including printers and PCs. Your entire electronic device will be interconnected, your phone will receive text messages that can be displayed on a tablet computer, and you can use your tablet to make a phone call. The current mobile phone on the market is Palm Pre 2, and here's an example of this system.

1 Technical Foundation

HP's webOS platform is built on WebKit (an Open-source browser engine), so anyone who uses HTML,CSS and JavaScript to design a Web site has the ability to create a webOS application. From this perspective, the threshold for development is greatly reduced, and today there are about 5,000 applications on the webOS system.

2 Introduction to main UI interaction elements

Card

This is a very basic concept of the system, and when you open a webOS application, you open a card and the screen based operation is done on the card.

Based on the cards we can basically do two kinds of behavior:

1 Exit an application (press the card and drag it up the screen). Personally feel that the proposed materialization of the design is very good, it is very consistent with people's daily life in the use of a thing.

2 Reorder the cards (press the card and drag it to the new position).

Gesture

The system's unique gesture operation has a sense of light, after all, it is much more fun than looking for a button on the screen alone.

Introduce two commonly used gestures:

1 Back gestures (use your fingers to slide from right to left in the gesture area).

2 Enter the card browsing mode (slide up from the gesture area to the screen).

3 Screen Size

The following are the sizes of each element in the Palm Pre 2 phone 320x480 screen:

4 Introduction to building a basic element of a scene

Command Menu Area

The area is laid out underneath a scene where the buttons are always visible and are used to trigger the most important operation in the scene. In order to ensure easy to click in the mobile environment, the general number of buttons in this area should not exceed 4.

Application Menu

The above mentioned command menu is used to prevent the webOS system common operations, those infrequently used operations are placed in the Command menu area. The Command menu area contains 3 options by default: Edit, Preferences, and Accounts, help. Here, the webOS system in the Command menu area to release the commonly used operations, and the use of unusual operations in the Application menu, so that the ease of use of the application greatly improved, you do not need from a bunch of operations to find the most common operations.

Head

When designing an application, we often hover over the head while browsing, and the webOS system defaults to providing two heads for our choice: rolling the head and fixing the head.

5 Elegant Notice

The webOS system displays messages at any time without affecting the user's current work. For example, a pop-up message notification or an alarm clock alert. It does not cause the user to use the application delay. After a few seconds, it will be minimized to a dashboard icon. At the same time, different types of notifications are represented by different icons, as shown in the following illustration. A notification of the iOS system appears as a dialog box on the screen, forcing the user to make an action, and cannot choose to handle it. It's no exaggeration to describe the webOS system with elegance.

6 Summary

The webOS system is designed in many places: the interactive design of physical and chemical, and the design of the command menu with elegant pop-up notification, rich texture of the interface ... But many people say that webOS is an "untimely" system in which the Apple product is religiously acclaimed, and the Android system, with its open source and powerful performance rapid expansion system, HP's webOS system needs to prove its strength in this growing market through a number of accomplishments in terms of hardware performance and application numbers. But from the UI point of view, the system is certainly very good, HP can make a difference in this field, we wait and see.