The Origin of the Shadow Home Screen
The excellent Shadow Home Screen, as many of you may know, is the result of a collaboration between T-Mobile and Microsoft. Over at the official Windows Mobile Team Blog, we get some insight into the background of the development of this new interface:
Normally when Windows Mobile creates a release, we release it out to OEMs who then do their own customizations. With this release, however, Microsoft worked with the OEM to create an experience that catered to what T-Mobile wanted. The OEM, HTC, had their talented industrial design team working on the hardware form-factor and wheel. Microsoft wrote the homescreen and worked out an interface for the myFaves information to bubble up for the user to see.
We worked with T-Mobile to finalize the user interaction as per their requirements. For example, in the animation you can see the myFaves flying in and out - that was a T-Mobile feature request in order to enable user privacy (so you avoid the awkward “Why is my boyfriend on your Fave 5?!” moment).
Included in this post about the origin of the Shadow Home Screen, there are a lot of other interesting details about the “Neo” interface (as it’s called internally at Microsoft), including comparisons with the default Home Screen and a dissection of each part of the interface. To read more, check out the Windows Mobile Team Blog.
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[...] Andrea Contino wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe excellent Shadow Home Screen, as many of you may know, is the result of a collaboration between T-Mobile and Microsoft. Over at the official Windows Mobile Team Blog, we get some insight into the background of the development of … [...]
December 1, 2007