TAT Home

On Valentines day the Swedish developer The Astonishing Tribe (or TAT) released their new concept video for an Android user interface, called TAT Home, which relied heavily on 3D graphics. TAT is most known for creating the original Android user interface.

While there were a lot of good ideas, there were also bad ideas. Lets start by reviewing the good ideas.

The first thing they show is the Widget Fan, as they call it, it’s basically an easy way to overview and choose your home screens. The thing I like about it, is that one can easily use it using the same hand that’s holding the phone making it easier to handle.
The thing that I liked the most was possibly the Alarm. It uses a new way of setting the time for the alarm clock that I can see being really fast to use when one gets used to it. At first you might be more careful with how many times you spin(?) the alarm, but once you’ve used it for a while you probably don’t even think about it.

What I didn’t like was the Messages Widget, maybe I’ve grown accustomed to the easy way of organizing SMS and MMS with the conversion metaphor, but only being able to see three messages at the time doesn’t seem optimal to me. There’s way too much scrolling with their implementation.
The same critique goes for the Music Remote. If you have several artists and several albums on your phone then it quickly becomes a hassle to scroll between artists and album. It may be a fun and new way to show the music player but it lacks the usability that I need. It would have been fun to see how they would have tackled user-created playlists since I seldom listen to only one album at the time.

When it comes to the Contact Widget, the Weather Widget and TAT Cascades, I’m fairly neutral.
The Contact Widget isn’t something new, the Weather Widget is functions as well as other weather widgets and TAT Cascades can cause a minor problem with the depth perception of the widgets but nothing to worry about.

TAT usually have a lot of great concepts and material so it’s always fun to see something new from them. Maybe their next release might come from two of my seniors from my education that are doing their master thesis work with them., who knows?

//Saligia