Symbian Theme Creator Needed

Symbian Foundation is soliciting proposals to create one or more signature themes for Symbian^3, which will reach feature complete in the beginning of 2010.

If you or your company has experience producing Symbian themes, please email me.

A theme is a set of visual elements and specially coded instructions for a Symbian phone’s visual design. Themes include but are not limited to:

* Icons

* UI controls, like scroll bars, menu drop downs, etc.

* Colors for type used throughout the UI

* Wallpapers

* More…

If you would like to learn more about themes, take a look at the Carbide.ui Theme Edition tutorial.

More documentation:

Themes overview

Forum Nokia Detailed Introduction to Themes

Forum Nokia’s Themes Quick Start

If you are interested in participating in this RFP (Request for Proposals), please email Scott.

Open Source and User Experience

On 26 September 2009 I presented the following slides at Over The Air 2009 in London. The presentation is about how we do user interface design and development work, and otherwise improve the user experience at Symbian Foundation. The audience asked some interesting questions about our contribution process, and expressed a strong interest in a working group for the theming tool for Symbian.

I joined Symbian Foundation as UI Technology Manager in May. It’s been exciting, challenging, and great fun.

View this document on Scribd

World’s First Mobile Phone Commercial

Centel sold the big “cell phone” bricks of yesteryear, which were objects of lust and envy. Following is what appears to be the world’s first mobile phone TV commercial, harking back to the heady year of 1989.

Mobile Journey Planning for Transport for London

Watching myself on video is super hard for me, but I just watched the nearly 30 minutes of video from a talk I gave on 23rd February in London for Mobile Design UK. There are some good bits and some bits I’d word differently, but overall it gives you a nice idea of where my team and I are going with a for-fun design we’re doing on the Transport for London Mobile Journey Planner. At the end of this posting is a link to the video.

I gave a talk at Mobile Design UK (organised by Bryan Rieger & Priya Prakash) on the continuation of HFI’s conceptual design for Transport for London. We carried forward my earlier World Usability Day London discussion about the mobile journey planner available from tflwap.gov.uk and turned it into a sweet design concept, including an XHTML prototype that I demoed using the dotMobi emulator.

You can see it all in the video below. It’s just shy of 30 minutes, so sit back and relax.

Play video

Nuance Mobile Newsmap

The Nuance Newsmap is a new news mashup that takes 40 news sources and crunches them into one handy Flash web page. It’s a bit of mobile industry porn, minus the photos. It borrows heavily from the SmartMoney Map of the Market: