It seems the screens we shared of an alternative home screen for the iPhone created some buzz. We had no intention of taking it any further than a blog post but we figured this was something worth seeing through.

We got in touch with Jay Freeman a.k.a saurik. He’s the guy behind Cydia, an application for jailbroken iPhones that allows you to browse and download apps outside of actual app store. He’s crazy smart, passionate and geeky — three things we love here at T+L. Jay is going to be instrumental in making this happen.

If you haven’t already figured it out, getting this on your phone will require you to jailbreak it. That may not be an appealing option for many, but for the 2 million plus out there who have already done it and for those that are comfortable with doing it, this can be a reality.

The app and the underlying technology to make it happen are still in development so what comes out the other side will differ from what we originally proposed. The biggest change will initially be that it will render only on the lock screen. We went down this road for a number of reasons, primarily because of its relative ease of implementation, though there’s nothing easy about it. Jay is creating a framework to write custom lock screens called Cydget. Our concept will act as the guinea pig.

No word on an actual release date yet due to a last minute crash bug, but from what we hear it’s not far off. We’ll make an official announcement once it’s available. You can follow @teehanlax @gteehan and @saurik if you’re looking for more detail since we tend to tweet about this stuff more frequently than we blog about it.

A simple but powerful method I use to illustrate what holistic participation means in the social web is to “L.E.T. GO”.

What does this mean in practice?

Listen / Learn:

Engage:

Transform:

Evolution isn’t static.

The anticipation of a site launch can be somewhat nerve-racking. We take our clients from strategy through to front-end code.The process takes months to work through. Stakeholders on both sides of table make decisions. Then, when everyone is agreed and code is delivered you wait. You wait for real people to marry deep technology to your design.

Today, The Toronto Star launched their new site. It was about 7am when I saw the Toronto Star redesign tweet on my phone. I couldn’t wait to get to the office and give it a thorough walkthrough. On the drive in I wondered how or if they had implemented the various news views and topic pages. I thought about the fit and finish – would it be polished?

“Determining the point at which you need to stop developing and get something live isn’t exactly a science”

Before I grabbed my coffee or took off my coat I opened a browser. It looked great. Of course, there are still quite a few differences from what we delivered, but that’s common in a release of this magnitude. It’s one thing to deliver a few dozen static templates but an entirely different one to bring it to life in a single release. Determining the point at which you need to stop developing and get something live isn’t exactly a science. There is risk on both sides of the equation and I think their decision to go live was a sound one.

Big congrats to the fine people at Torstar for pushing it live knowing it’s not finished (they say so themselves) “The new star.com is not a finished product – it will change as we go”. Now the focus shifts from getting it live to continually improving it. They can now analyze usage, collect feedback and most importantly, use it themselves to inform new releases. Working through issues in strategy decks, wireframes, static designs, working prototypes and development environments will never come close to using the real thing. I think it’s one hell of a good start and I look forward to seeing the new platform evolve.

A few highlights of the redesign

The optional news views remove much of the noise that gets presented on a traditional view.

Visual News

Visual News looks stunning. It allows users to scan the news via images and small headlines. Try it out, I think it provides a refreshing perspective on the day’s events.

Grid View

The Grid View let’s you see not only the homepage news in a uniformed way but also the main level categories of news like Business or Entertainment.

Timeline View

The last news view of this initial release is the Timeline View. It shows you every story published, in order, since you were last on the site.

Topics

This is far and away the best new feature of the site. I don’t always have time to follow every story as it unfolds. Topics offer deep coverage of stories and subjects. They aggregate stories, photos, videos and interactive pieces about people, sports teams, places and issues. Want to see what’s new with the Letterman story? Check out the David Letterman topic page for all the related material and milestones. The main topics page is also a nice place to start your experience.

Before & After Homepage

When Geoff and I started this company we were convinced it wouldn’t last. I would always think of that line from Heat where DeNiro says “allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner”. That was us. That is how we operated for the first year. We paid cash for everything, we didn’t take on any long term commitments. If we felt the heat we could fold the tent, split the money and be gone in 30 seconds.

That was seven years ago. We are seven years old today. That’s 49 in dog years. Fuck. Me.

We never meant to do this. It was an accident. We don’t plan anything other than some really high level goals at the beginning of the year. We do what feels right when it feels right. For the most part it works out really well.

So how does this thing work because it’s not due to any great plan on our part?

It works because Shannon, Gilli and Paul have worked here almost as long as we’ve been in business.
It works because Dave and Jeremy help us run this place.
It works because Angie takes care of the office and makes sure people’s birthdays are dealt with.
It works because Chris, Pete, Zack, Bobak and Brendan make things work so well, it makes grown men weep.
It works because Nals, Stevo, Tanner, Dunc and GDub take the vague ideas we have, improve them, design them and then make us look good.
It works because Kate writes in her lonely writer’s garrett (we promise we will get you some company soon).
It works because Alyssa and Joan make sure we know what we’re doing and when we’re doing it for.
It works despite the fact J-Dogg and Jonas use PCs.
And it will work better with Tamera and Adam joining.

But mainly it works because none of this feels like work.

Thanks to all our staff and clients who have kept us here for 7 years.

We are currently seeking a Senior Art Director (5+ years experience) to hire on a freelance basis on a 2-3 month contract to start. The ideal candidate is able to turn strategic goals into a coherent design direction and oversee projects from project kick-off to launch. Have strong experience with Programs and be able to work in our studio on a regular basis.

Qualifications

• 5+ years agency experience in the digital channel.
• College or University Graduate in a related discipline (design training with solid typography, graphic and interaction design skills).
• Proven track record as a freelancer.
• A Bitchin’ Portfolio.

Skills

• Strong concept development and graphic design ability.
• Excellent understanding of composition, color, imagery, typography.
• Strong working experience with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and optimization for web.
• Experience creating and working with site maps, online ad rich media storyboards, user flow, wireframes, and other information design documents for web sites and online advertsing.
• Experience working with various online ad design specs and media requirements.
• Excellent understanding of user experience issues.
• Good understanding of HTML, DHTML, and JavaScript (rollovers, pop-ups) and the capabilities of web browsers and user interaction.
• Solid experience creating Web graphics, animations, user interfaces, icons, style sheets, color schemes, templates and layouts for use in online advertising and web site projects, ensuring site- wide color and typeface standards and consistency.
• Experience providing art direction to flash and web developers.
• Ability to self-manage projects and work within time deadlines.
• Team oriented, self-motivated.

What’s different about working at Teehan+Lax

We focus exclusively on front end user experience design for the digital channel. There are no back-end build teams, no offline divisions. Everyone you’ll be working with desires to create best in breed user experiences. In fact, 90% of the staff here hold creative positions. That means no Account Managers, no Managing Directors, no Business Analysts. We maintain very little hierarchy. There are two roles at Teehan+Lax: Partners and Associates. The people with the right skills are put on the right projects. We’re small and nimble. There are no pitch teams, no “B” teams. All of our staff work directly with our clients, so if a client has a question that relates to IA they’ll speak to the Associate or Partner who worked on it – not an account manager.

How to Apply

If you’re talented, smart, hard-working and dedicated, we’ll enable you to do the best work of your career. Send us a resume and portfolio of your work to “jobs [at] teehanlax [dot] com”.

Photoshop hacks need not apply.

• Include a link to your portfolio site
• Must be located in the GTA and available to work in our studio regularly
• Have references available upon request

Suitable candidates will be contacted promptly. Please no phone calls.

I’d have loved for this post to be the introduction of our latest iPhone application. An application that introduces a new default optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you. We’ll all have to keep dreaming for the time being. Unless you’re willing to jailbreak your phone it simply isn’t possible to develop and implement this type of hostile UI takeover using the iPhone SDK.

Until then (we’re doubtful that sort of freedom will ever be available) Here’s how we might design a new home screen.

You can see from the screens it’s essentially just a scrollable list of applications and notifications. We envision it behaving in much the same way that the list view does in the Calendar application. By default it may track things like missed calls, unread emails and calendar events. But what if users could allow other apps to feed into this screen as well? If I’m a Facebook junkie I’d be able to tell the Facebook app to include certain feeds on my home screen. If I was a frequent traveler I may include the Tripit app to show me my upcoming trips. The options would only be limited by what apps you have installed.

Update: The demand for this has been too great to ignore. We’re building a working version of this. More details and screens to follow. You can follow us at twitter.com/teehanlax

A scrollable screen of the stuff that matters to me.

Application preferences would allow users to include certain feeds on their home screens.

Jon had mentioned (as did Drew in the comments) he’d like this info without having to unlock the phone. I agree. If only development were this easy.

[Note: I have written this quickly and will clean it up over the next few days. I wanted to get some thoughts down prior to the launch. I apologize for typos or clunky language.]

On Tuesday (Aug 25, 2009), I attended an invite only event thrown by Bell. I, along with about a dozen others, were given a Palm Pre and one month of Bell service. We were given a short walk through of the device and orientation. Here are my impressions of using the phone over the past 48 hours.

In the interest of full disclosure, we are the Agency of Record for Virgin Mobile which is owned by Bell. We do some work for Bell but not Bell Mobility. I use an iPhone 3Gs on the Fido network as my primary phone.

Introduction
I first saw the Pre at CES in January. My initial impressions were very favorable. I really thought they did a great job with the design of both the software and the hardware, but at CES we were not allowed to handle the phone so it was a little like watching someone model clothes for you and deciding if it would look good on you.

A few months ago, I was invited to a private Bell event around the announcement of them bringing the Pre to Canada. I was given a walk through of the phone similar to the one I had seen at CES. There were some additional details on the SDK and some features that had been solidifed from CES but essentially it was the phone I had already seen.

Tuesday was the first time I got to actually USE the phone.

Setup
The setup is incredibly easy. Turn on the phone and it will ask you for a language preference. Then it will get you to create a profile using your primary email address. It informs you that it has sent you an email which you will need to activate the phone.

It then asks you if you want location services turned on. Which you will say “yes” to. There are some terms of service agreeing that Google can watch where you go.

Then, you are given a short tutorial on how to use the gesture space. The gesture area is the strip right below the screen. By swiping your finger from right to left in this area you are able to go “back” in any application.

That is the only thing they teach you in the tutorial. That’s it. At first I thought it was bad design if this phone needed to teach you to use it. Shouldn’t it be intuitive? But after you use the Pre for a while you understand that you use this gesture a lot. I forgave them for teaching me this gesture since it saves a lot of time when using the Pre.

After that a short video plays. This video is annoying and unnecessary but it does showcase what can only be described as an amazing screen. I think the phone is doing some work in the background and this is intended to make you ignore “the man behind the curtain”. After the video it reboots. Go do a load of laundry because the Palm boot up is looooonnnngggg.

My one complaint with setup is from turn on to actually getting to the home screen it took about 5 minutes. It felt like a long time to get up and running.

First impressions
The phone UI looks very good. Physics are smooth, the touchscreen is responsive. Unlike the iPhone the home screen is bare. 4 default applications (phone, email, calendar, contacts) sit in the launch strip at the bottom of the screen above the gesture area. The fifth icon opens a series of screens that hold the other applications.

There is one hard button in the center of the gesture area. This allows you to “minimize” any current application.

Cards
The UI metaphor WebOS uses is called cards. Cards are just running applications. When you launch an application it fills the whole screen. You can press the center button it scales the application back revealing the home screen. You can now launch another application.

You are now running 2 applications. This is VERY IMPORTANT! Two applications simultaneously. You hear that Apple? More on this later.

By pressing the center button again, you can launch a third (fourth, fifth) application or go back into the first application. Each application becomes a card on your phone. You switch between cards by dragging your finger across the screen to the left or right. Cards are ordered in the order you launched them. You can change this order by touching a card and holding. The card will scale down and you can reorder them by dragging.

I love these cards. They are great. I can have email running while sending a txt message and having a Web page loading. I can switch between them easily just like on my computer.

Closing an application is so easy, you just “flick it” off the screen. By moving your finger from the center of the card upwards to the top of the phone you ditch the app. It is so rewarding to flick off the applications. Great UI detail!

The Cloud
One of the unique features of the Pre is that it LOVES the cloud. The name WebOS is very appropriate because it really uses the Web to function well. One of the first things I did was enter my Facebook credentials. The Pre went and got my friend list and placed it into my contacts. It did the same for my Google Contacts and if we ran Exchange it would do it for that.

Since Facebook supports contact info it brings that info into the Pre. Also contacts immediately get Facebook profile photos. If your Facebook contact changes their photo or info, it is reflected on your Pre.

I was a little upset it didn’t support LinkedIn natively. You can download the LinkedIn app but those contacts do not end up in your contacts.

Calendars that exist in the cloud like Google Calendar and Exchange will sync as soon as you provide your login credentials.

Syncing
Since my calendars and contacts don’t exist in the cloud, they exist on my computer I needed to figure out how to sync the Pre with my Mac. My iPhone has good syncing of Apple’s Address Book and iCal through iTunes.

When you plug the Pre into your computer it gives you three options

If you choose “Media Sync” the Pre shows up as an iPod in iTunes. Awesome. It will sync everything as if it were an iPod. Everything except calendars. I had to go and download something called Data Transfer Assistant from Palm which grabbed my iCal calendars and imported them to the phone. Sort of. There were missing events and unless I migrate to a cloud service like Google Calendar I will need to go throughout this process every time. There is software from Mark/Space called The Missing Sync that will solve some of these issues but out of the box syncing is less than perfect on a Mac.

App Store
Palm has an app store. I immediately downloaded OpenTable, LinkedIn and Tweed (a passable Twitter client). Right now all apps are free while the App store is in beta. The key to the success of this device will be the apps. The choice right now is pretty thin but give me some good apps, and I will over look a lot of short comings.

Homebrew App Store
There is an alternative app store that has some very good apps. It requires putting your phone into Dev mode and using non Palm approved apps but for the adventurous Pre owner, well worth it.

http://www.precentral.net/homebrew-apps

Music Player
While the Pre syncs with iTunes and pulls your music and videos onto the Pre, that is all it does. The Pre music player sucks. There I said it. It sucks.

It pulled all my Podcasts into the music app but it just presented them as a list. No indication of what had been listened to or organized by subscription. Essentially useless. There are stand alone podcast applications available but I manage all my media through iTunes so this solution doesn’t appeal to me

When you view by song/artist there is no a-z listing to easily jump to a specific song or artist. There is an app in the homebrew app store called Music (remix) which corrects some of the deficiencies in the stock app, but its still way underwhelming.

If you want to carry one device phone/media player, the iPhone is way better.

Camera
It has one. It’s 3 megapixel with LED flash. Takes a good picture. ‘Nuff said.

Video Camera
Doesn’t have one. Don’t really care.

Keyboard
Hard keyboard is the reason to get this phone. I hate the iPhone keyboard. Absolutely hate it. Steve Jobs lied to me when he said I would get used to it. I was so excited to get my hands on this phone just so I could feel the key press as I write.

After 48 hours I can tell you, this keyboard is… meh.

The buttons are very small. They are also this plastic coated sort, almost like its a waterproof keyboard. The travel on the depression of the keys is short and sticky. The keyboard is inset in a crater in the slide out mechanism. This means your thumbs rub up against a sharp edge of the slider mechanism.

Compared to a Blackberry the Pre keyboard is terrible. Compared to no keyboard it’s amazing. I am getting used to the keyboard. I would dread having to respond to messages in length on my iPhone. I don’t think twice about writing complete sentences and thoughts with the Pre. If Palm could slap an old Treo keyboard on the Pre it would be perfect.

Multitasking
This is where the Pre wins. The ability to multitask is so good. It alerts me when emails, txt messages or IMs have come in. It alerts me to appointments. I can have multiple IM conversations going and check an email. All of this is not doable on the iPhone. I have determined that doing “business” on an iPhone is essentially impossible since you can not multitask. Push notification is total BS, it is not a replacement for multitasking.

Conclusion
There are many other features I love and complaints I have about this phone. But here is the bottom line. It is a very good phone. It has a great balance of business features and personal features.

It definitely feels like a first generation product. It needs a faster processor or more memory since it can bog down a little when you have multiple cards open.

Will it knock out my iPhone as my primary phone? Hard to say after 48 hours. If the media player were better and the app selection larger, I would say it has a really good chance.

I am going to keep using the Pre over the next few weeks and post some thoughts as I get closer to the end of the month.

Yesterday Jon visited the BNN studios to chat about the Palm Pre. For those not in the know, it launches today. Watch the video for his thoughts.

Two steps forward, one step back. That’s how I feel about the crappy media scrubbing interface built into the iPhone, iPod touch, and I guess pretty much all touch screen-based media devices. Ever since I “upgraded,” I’ve missed my scroll-wheel.

The playhead/timeline widget is frustrating to use and doesn’t facilitate navigation of media with any real precision.

What’s worse, the level of navigational precision decreases in proportion to the length of the audio or video file. That’s because more time gets mashed into the same 1.8’’ of scrubbable timeline space. This is really apparent for things like podcasts, audiobooks, movies, etc.

There are 2 problems here:

1. the UI requires me to use a course-grain input method (my finger on a small display) to control a fine-grain input mechanism (timeline/playhead).
2. There’s a fixed, linear mapping between input and output. In fact, they’re one and the same: input = output.

The scrollwheel doesn’t have these problems because a) the input method and interface mechanism are both course-grain, and b) input and output are only loosely coupled.

Let me explain b) a little better. The scroll-wheel is an example of an indirect, or mediated interface. I manipulate the wheel, which in turn affects the playhead’s position along the timeline. At the end of the day, this means that revolutions on the scrollwheel can translate into an increment of time that’s absolute vs. proportional to the duration of the media file.

Apple designers even inserted some really smart code into this mediation layer that let me use other cues on the scrollwheel—like velocity and acceleration—to control how fast or slow playhead moved along (like shifting gears). It works really well, and in my opinion was key to the success of the iPod early on. (Do you remember the first time you used the scollwheel on an iPod? I do.)

It’s worth pointing out that Apple could essentially make a touch-screen version of the scroll-wheel interface for iPod Touch and iPhone.

I’m not holding my breath…

Having been born in the late ‘70s (ahem) I can clearly recall the amazing transformation that digital innovations quickly brought to my everyday life. I got to witness the significant firsts that made everything suddenly accessible – the first web site I visited (in awe), my first ICQ chat with people I just met “online”, the first search engine I used for research, my first “wireless” phone (what a brick!); and the list goes on and on. The things that we pretty much take for granted now.

‘The bottom line is this: if you understand the Net Generation, you will understand the future.’ D. Tapscott

I just started reading Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital which predicts and discusses the traits of the Net Generation (aka Gen Z, Digital Natives). Those born in the ‘90s who will never have penpals, fax a confirmation, or look at an encyclopedia (among a million other things). This notion of such a generation gap initially scared me – imagine a generation that has everything accessible at all times, anywhere!

But then it got me thinking about the unique opportunities this brings to my so-called Y Generation (aka Trophy Kids, Echo Boomers). We get to be the first group to fully share and embrace future experiences with the younger lot – our nieces, nephews and kids. Something that even our parents can’t say.

We will also get to use phrases that start with “Back in my day…”. Here’s to looking forward, together.