Last week, designer Cody Sanfilippo shared (via TUAW) an interesting concept of what Spotlight on iOS could be like. Drawing inspiration from Siri’s results, widgets, and some third-party apps that already enable similar functionalities, I find Cody’s concept worth of a deeper discussion. Particularly following the release of iOS 6 yesterday and the many refinements it brings to several areas of the OS, I think Spotlight is one of the stock functionalities that could use an overhaul in the future.

Cody’s proposed design essentially breaks down Spotlight by filters, and makes it play nicer with third-party apps and their content. It is aimed at reducing taps required to perform some actions such as calling a contact, or playing a song, and, overall, it takes some of the functionalities of Siri and translates them into a text-based input.

With this new system in place, you are capable of doing things a lot quicker. For example, tap phone numbers to call from Contact results. Tap their email addresses to email them. Tap “play” on a music result to play the song without ever entering the Music app. Check calendar events, or notes, or reminders instantly. You get all this information at a glance, without ever opening the applications. Of course, tapping the entry (the arrow in Contacts, entire clipping in Notes, etc) will bring you into that application.

In Cody’s vision, Spotlight could gain “filters” to display as buttons at the bottom. So rather than searching for a string of text across your entire operating system, you’d gain the option to refine your results by restricting them to a certain application, like Contacts. Looking for “Mike” in the current Spotlight, for instance, would bring up results from your Address Book, Music, Mail, Messages, and more. If you know you just want to view Mike’s contact card, though, you could enable a Contacts filter, and display a Siri-like card with phone number, Twitter username, and email addresses you can tap on.

Perhaps contacts aren’t the best way to illustrate how such concept could help users save time (though I’m a fan of Cody’s design idea for this). Say you want to play a song: with “Spotlight 2.0”, you could hit Play directly from a search result, saving you the time to open the Music app, view the playback screen, etc. Sanfilippo thought of various implementations for this concept for several built-in apps.

In my opinion, however, the really forward-thinking idea is the possible third-party app integration. You know how Spotlight can look at the contents of your Mail messages? Imagine if it’d be able to return songs from Rdio or Spotify, or tasks from OmniFocus without opening those apps.

That’s a very powerful concept, and one that is not too dissimilar from the Siri API many developers have been expecting since last year. Such an idea – a system that can “look into apps” for certain types of content it understands and returns as results – would probably require major changes by developers to their apps, although, as we’ve seen in the past week, developers who are truly committed to their apps will always update them with support for the latest technologies and devices.

If you’re interested in Cody Sanfilippo’s concept for a better Spotlight, I suggest you head over his website, where you can find a detailed explanation of his ideas, a UI breakdown, and some thoughts on the implications of a different Spotlight. If you’re interested in reading more on the subject, I also recommend this article by Rene Ritchie, which touched upon many similar points back in June.

You can check out the concept video below. (more…)

It’s pre-WWDC speculation time. This year, like most, many people think about what new features and capabilities the next version of iOS could include. After watching some concept videos (including one by Jan Micheal Cart) and reading some iOS 6 wish lists, designer Joost van der Ree also decided to present some of his ideas on how Apple could improve the usability of iOS in a short YouTube video.

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Remember how, before the iPad was unveiled in January 2010, speculation was running wild as to whether Apple would simply use a larger virtual keyboard on the device? Back then, some rumors claimed the bigger nature of the device would force Apple to come up with some crazy and revolutionary way to type text on screen. As it turned out, Apple simply replicated the iPhone’s soft keyboard on the initial version of iPhone OS 3.2, making it almost laptop-size. In fact, the biggest change to the iPad’s software keyboard only happened with iOS 5.0 last year with the introduction of the split keyboard.

That’s not to say everything related to the iOS keyboard is perfect and Apple should stop improving on it. As the plethora of Dropbox text editors have showed, there is a need for different, possibly customizable keyboards that give better access to text selection tools.

In my list of wishes for iOS 6, I forgot to mention I really would like to see easier, faster text selection coming to the iPhone and iPad. I believe iOS’ text selection method is one of the best around, yet Apple could do better. For writers, selecting text — not typing it — simply isn’t nearly as fast as on a laptop. And the problem is not the keyboard — the issue persists with external Bluetooth keyboards — it’s the design of iOS itself that forces you to get your hands off the keyboard to manipulate text.

iDownloadBlog has posted an interesting concept video by YouTube user “danielchasehooper”, showing an interesting possible take on text selection on the iPad. By allowing users to tap and swipe on the keyboard, this system could, in theory, allow for faster selection, also in combination with keys like Shift. Almost every area of iOS now supports taps and swipes: why not the keyboard?

Concepts are what they are — ideas — but sometimes Apple seems to consider them. I don’t know if this video will turn out to be a feature Apple will evaluate — albeit it really makes a lot of sense in my opinion, design-wise — but I sure hope something’s cooking for iOS 6 in regards to text selection.

With the introduction of the Mac App Store, Mac applications are starting to follow iOS’s updating process which involves visiting the Update tab, optionally reading about what’s changed, and updating your applications from a central hub. We’re accustomed to this on iOS — it makes sense where control over each mobile application has been centralized from the very beginning and where you’re likely to have a greater abundance of small apps to update. The transition from third party software suites to the Mac App Store, however, has caused a bit of a clash between applications and how they update themselves. Coming from a world where Sparkle informs us of updates when we launch applications, we’re accustomed to seeing pop-ups informing us of new updates for our few Mac apps as we need them. I myself prefer this type of notification on the desktop.

There are problems with both methods. Sparkle’s update pop-up forces you to stop what you’re doing to deal with the update notification, and currently the Mac App Store doesn’t notify you of updates unless you manually check the store. With these two problems in mind, Lennart Ziburski designed a concept that freshly implements ideas already familiar to us from apps like Safari and Spotlight on Lion.

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You’ve probably seen at least one of Jan-Michael Cart iOS concept videos in the past, including this fantastic iMessage app concept for the Mac, or his conceptualization of dictation on the iPhone 4S. His YouTube channel is full of bright ideas on how iOS can progress with a variety of new features, and it seems his impressive repertoire of concept videos have landed him a gig at Apple itself. “It’s Official. UI/UX design.” Cart will begin at Apple as an intern while keeping his friends and family updated on his WordPress blog.

Welcome to the new blog section of my website. Soon I will be embarking to California, where I will be interning at a fruit company for seven months. I will be updating this to chronicle my adventures and misadventures in the Bay Area for my family, friends, and followers online. Stay tuned, I leave in less than a month!

This isn’t the first time Apple has acquired talent from the iOS community, hiring the developer of MobileNotifier, Peter Hajas, earlier this year. Congratulations to Cart for a splendid invite at Apple. Hopefully we’ll see his ideas permeate in future iOS updates sooner than later!

[via iPhoneinCanada]

I think it’s clear that Apple is keeping a keen eye on the community when it comes to UI concepts and other imaginative implementations from the jailbreak community, and it’s possible they could at least snatch one good idea from this latest mockup. A concept video created by a charming Jan-Michael Cart shows off some pretty rad improvements, including being able to select a WiFi network in the Notification Center, improved popovers, and a multitasking bar whose icons rotate with the iPhone’s orientation (my favorite).

Check past the break to see the concepts in action — I think the WiFi notifications are really nice.

[via Jan-Michael Cart]

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Ever since Apple unveiled iMessage for iOS 5, its new universal messaging protocol to send free text messages, videos and pictures to other iOS users, many have wondered whether the new app would be integrated with the Mac as well, perhaps in a new version of iChat. iMessage for iOS brings some new functionalities like delivery and read receipts in real-time, as well as sync and Messages.app integration, but it resembles the desktop iChat in the way it visualizes new messages, or lets you see when a person is typing. With the upcoming iCloud integration in OS X Lion, launching this Fall and available right now to developers for testing as a beta add-on, there is the possibility Apple will release a standalone iMessage app for Mac in the Mac App Store once iCloud is available for all. Just like they did with FaceTime, the app could be sold for $0.99 in the Store, and pre-installed by default on new systems.

Based on this kind of speculation, designer Jan-Michael Cart, creator of other iOS 5 concepts we posted ahead of WWDC, has come up with an interesting idea for iMessage on OS X Lion. The messaging protocol could have its own desktop app powered by real-time notifications, bounce on the Dock upon receiving new messages, and have a Mail-like toolbar for composing new messages and search among existing ones. We imagine having a desktop iMessage app could mean users would be able to rely on system-wide integration with Services to send any text to iMessage, as well as start a new FaceTime session from a contact in iMessage or the Address Book.

The concept video is interesting and we have embedded it after the break. iMessages are currently enabled in the iOS 5 betas for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but some code strings found in the latest Lion developer preview suggest Apple might be working on a desktop counterpart to launch later this year.
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Black Design Associates, LLC, an Los Angeles-based consultancy, revealed a concept for a hybrid iPhone / Leica called the i9. It’s a 12.1 megapixel, 8x zoom, fully featured iPhone 4 accessory. Before you break out your credit card, remember this is only a concept.

The i9 has a camera/iPhone toggle that turns on your camera with an instant start-up time of 0.3sec., while simultaneously loading the Leica app on your iPhone 4. A zoom/volume control adjusts tight and wide when your camera is on, and adjusts volume up and down when your camera is off. Dedicated aperture and shutter dials offer fast and easy options for manual operation. Pass-through and actuators give you full access to your iPhone 4 controls and headphone jack. The flash and light meter offers higher quality photos and videos in low-light conditions.

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With speculation running wild about Apple’s upcoming software announcements at the WWDC ’11 — where the company is expected to showcase the next versions of iOS and Mac OS X — it doesn’t come as a surprise that the Internet is exploding with concepts and mockups of what iOS 5 will look like on the iPhone and iPad, let alone the fan-made renderings that aim at giving us a possible glimpse of the iPhone 5. Jan-Michael Cart, the same guy behind the iOS 5 voice recognition concept we posted two weeks ago, has come up with a new interface idea for the Dashboard, available on YouTube alongside his collection of iOS concept videos.

Of all the videos created by Cart in the past weeks, we think this might be the nicest and most interesting one. By taking inspiration from the Lion Dashboard, which retains the same look of the Snow Leopard one but can be launched with a single swipe to the right from the desktop, Cart imagines an iOS Dashboard that resides on the current Spotlight page on the left of the Home screen, and can be activated with an horizontal swipe. Rather than replacing the Spotlight search with the Dashboard, Cart has conceptualized a way to add widgets to this screen and start a new search by simply hitting the box at the top, like you normally would on iOS. When performing a search the Dashboard screen blurs in the background; Cart has also imagined a variety of widgets that can be placed on multiple pages on the left, such as a Facebook box and a Twitter ticker to stay on top of the latest messages from users you follow. In another video posted on his YouTube channel, Cart also describes how widgets could be created from the dedicated Dashboard page, but also dragged to the Home screen. As to how users would be able to swipe between the Dashboards and Springboard pages, Cart believes the Home button would play a key role in both cases, as seen in the screenshots below.

We have embedded the video after the break. Whilst recent rumors have claimed Apple is focusing on features like location and smart voice recognition for iOS 5, it’s likely that ahead of the public launch of OS X Lion Apple will consider porting over some functionalities from the desktop to mobile devices. The video below is a good example of that.
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