If our blockbuster Topaz Spec leak wasn't enough for you, we have another leak of a document from last year. This one details suggests for webOS User Interface. While it's all preliminary stuff, there's enough here to hint at what some of the UI elements will look like on webOS slates.
Read on for the details!
New Gestures and Text selectors
First up, it looks like HP is planning on bringing more complicated gestures. In addition to the standard scroll, tap, and pinch to zoom, we also have:
- Double Tap
- Tap & drag
- Tap & hold
- 2 finger tap
- 2 finger tap + drag
It's not clear yet what these new gestures will achieve, but we're gratified to finally see hints of the tap-and-hold gesture - presumably many of the interactions that previously required holding down the option key or tapping in the gesture area then pressing a key will be moved to pop-up dialogs.
One of those pop-up dialogs will likely be text-selection, which right now requires some finger/keyboard gymnastics.
As you can see, these text manipulation pop-ups more closely match the standards on iOS and Android 2.3.
Virtual Keyboard
That webOS will be picking up a virtual keyboard should be a surprise to exactly nobody. What is interesting is that HP looks to have a small toolbar above the keyboard with some useful functions that can be slotted in:
- Hide keyboard
- jump between form fields
- step through characters
Currently text selection requires holding down the Opt or Shift key on the physical keyboard, but even with whatever new text-selection paradigm comes on the tablet, it's nice to see that HP is trying to make things a little easier here.
Panel Interface
If you don't remember, Palm showed us a "preview" of a next-generation email application for webOS based on Enyo featuring a paned-interface with lists on the left and content on the right. It magically auto-expanded depending on the size of the screen. If you've used the Twitter app for the iPad, you know what we mean.
That interface looks to be coming to email for sure:
Pop-up dialog boxes
Similar to how the iPad handles certain actions, it looks like webOS will pop up standard dialog boxes like calendar creation and even map details in modal pop-up dialog boxes.
Map Improvements
File under "no-brainer:" it looks like we may finally get some real improvement to Google Maps. Unfortunately, the only genuinely new feature hinted at here is the ability to save place bookmarks.
Tabs and Pages
While webOS currently makes it easy to open multiple web pages in multiple cards, with larger screen real estate it probably makes sense to add tabs. No guarantee that the above will actually make its way into the web browser, but HP definitely has some clear ideas of what a default tab interface should look like.
Additionally, HP also has ideas for how a paged-interface should look - they've deprecated a page-curl for the turning page you see above.
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