It’s Possible To Design Gorgeous Applications For Symbian

I have mixed feelings about apps with their own UI. There's no denying that the above apps look pretty compared to the vanilla S60 UI. However, there's a lot to be said for UI consistency: If you're used to how your phone's menus, softkeys, input mechanisms etc. work it can be confusing and/or irritating when something doesn't follow those rules.
An example of this is Opera which hides my signal strength indicator – unless I switch away to the homescreen or another app I don't know if I'm using 2G/3G/WiFi (which could have billing implications!) or whether I have reception at all (OK, eventually a page load will time out with a connection error, but I prefer to know in advance that it won't work). It's a small thing (and Opera is a great app otherwise) but it is annoying and a direct result of them making their own UI. (As it happens, I've also noticed that text input on Opera is a bit weird on my E55 with it's half-QWERTY keyboard).
Also, non-standard UIs will almost always ignore user's theme choices and other preferences (e.g. text size settings).
Of course, given that the S60 UI is a bit basic compared to newer UIs like iPhone it's no surprise that developers are getting impatient and improving things themselves. However, when the UI is refreshed with DirectUI I would hope that apps once again follow the standard (since they'll need to rewrite things anyway when switching to Qt). Perhaps the app developers who have made nice UIs in their apps can contribute to the Symbian Foundation and use their expertise to help shape the whole UI in future!

Japan Symbian has better UI for usability. Their UI were design by Acrodea

James Nash has it right!

Sure, you can list several S60 applications with their own UI toolkits. (You should really mention the U-shaped media menu of the Nokia N95-1 though, which was a prime example of what's actually possible on top of Symbian, if it weren't for Nokia not opening that XML framework :-/)

Point is, having a few beautiful applications doesn't help the users (everything else stays ugly), nor the developers (start from scratch or pay a lot), nor the platform. Something more advanced than AVKON _must_ be integrated, like yesterday. ^4 and Orbit are too far away.

Attractive software makes me feel better. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I take a dull view of any software – on computer or phone – that hasn't be designed to make me feel good about using it.

Would people read a book that used nothing but the Comic Sans font?
Would people watch a TV show that was completely unedited?
Would people listen to classical music played using untuned instruments?

The smartphone industry is mature enough for developers to start showing some concern for the details, the seemingly small things that appeal to our humanness. As you've pointed out, apps like Spotify and Opera show that this can be done on Symbian.

Good post. You can also add Opera 10 that has a really nice interface. And Sensible Sudoku (it's a gama but the UI and effects are also great).

Good post Rita; and as usual, you hit the nail on the head when you said, “Suddenly, it downed on us that Symbian developers had just been lazy or had lacked communication with UI designers when building their applications. The standards were highered as everyone expected more UI creativity and beauty from all the other software companies, and they didn’t deceive.”

That statement needs to be published everywhere as a developer – for any platform – needs to understand that user interface developement, and the entire user experience framework, isn't just a matter of offering funcitonality, but a matter of making sure that the funcitonality is seamless to the purpose of the service/application.

Very valid argument James. As a matter of fact, the one thing I hate about my iPod Touch is that there is no similarity whatsoever in the 3rd party apps UI, u never know if the Settings are in the app itself or in the general iPod Settings, there's not one way to go back, or one way to interact with them, it's not chaos, it's a “swirling vortex of entropy” as Sheldon (The Big Bang Theory) would call it (http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0064640/quotes).
Anyway, the point is though, that when a UI is as dull and as old as Symbian, it is a good thing to have some apps differentiate themselves from the rest, esp when the new UI they make doesn't get in the way of the apps functionality. Now I would argue that probably the best way would be to have the different things at a set place, but to give developers the freedom to change how that is viewed (round button, square button, bar…) so that a certain amount of creativity is left without getting in the way of the user experience.
As for the E55, don't get me started on how many apps simply hate that bloody keyboard, and please don't get me started on how the french azerty is even miles worse than the english qwerty in terms of interaction with apps. Seriously.

Please refer above for my answer to James. As for it not benefiting the users or the platform, I'd argue with that. I think the new Symbian Foundation is keeping a very close eye on the changes that 3rd party developers are bringing to improve usability. As an example, I'd like to use a (very) outdated but (very) relevant story.
Back in 2006, on Windows Mobile 5, there was a couple of apps by SpbSoftwareHouse called Mobile Shell and Pocket Plus that overhauled the whole UI and added some very needed improvements to Windows Mobile. A while later, HTC started copying those improvements (in a very obvious manner to old Spb users), and made them part of their own HTC UI (think back to the first HTC Touch days), then Windows integrated them in Windows Mobile 6.5 and now 7. Did the users benefit? Yes. Did the platform benefit? Yes. The developers had a lot of trouble, and almost gained nothing out of it, obviously, other than the recognition that they started it all.

Opera Mobile is cited as the 2nd example in the post :) As for Sensible Sudoku, I love the game, but I was thinking more about apps that brought something additional to the platform. Thanks for mentioning it though, it's definitely a fine work by Ludimate.

Thanks for the compliment Antoine :)

And your second point is very valid. I would say that I don't mind that Epocware and SmartphoneWare's apps offer a basic UI, after all they're mostly utilities and they don't need to be over-complicated with graphics and such. But I would've had a lot more trouble if OperaMini came with all the useless huge toolbars and menu bars as the built-in webbrowser, or if you had to highlight a tweet and click Options to get all the different possibilities in Gravity. These 7 apps, I believe, although still a rare example of a raising trend, have a perfect design that is fitted for their own purpose. We're also seeing the same changes in Widgets as well, where the developers are having a blast out of remaking the whole thing.

Use of Typefaces is the part of any UI that I feel contributes, perhaps more than any other, to user satisfaction and therefore I would nominate “flipfont” which enables the use of Monotype fonts; using Helvetica or Goudy Sans has refreshed my phone as much as Gravity did.

symbian foundation can definitely learn a lot from developers such those mentioned above. some things also came to my attention the transition used on the s60 tend to be bland and unimaginative . more should be done to improve on it as more power users have found a way to add more effects which only shows the complacency on the part of nokia. How can handy shell replicate these and yet nokia finds it difficult to add these bells and whistles to its devices..having used the iphone 3GS and G1. i don't think it would take much to improve s60 to meet up with the other OSes

I feel strange for having seen the potential of Symbian WAY before these apps came along. I expected them to come around ever since I got a Nokia 6600. While these Apps break from the integration with the default UI, by pushing the envelope, it should give a kick to those UI designers who have been lazy over the years. Also, in the past, the technology just wasn't there in order to power all the cool eye-candy (Gravity lags a bit on my new(ish) N81 when in landscape mode), but when the tech became available, due to the age and userbase od the s60 UI, the designers took a break from improving the UI. Hopefully they'll get back on track, and with S^2/S^3 using the OMAP3430 as the base chipset, the harware support is definitely there, all we need is for the coders to wake up and improve the UI, change it completely if needed while hopefully keeping the basic API/security features intact so older apps will be able to run flawlessly

Possibly, but you have to realize that all Android devices and the iPhones have some pretty awesome hardware (128+MB RAM, dedicated GPU) while Nokia have fallen back in terms of hardware: removing the TI OMAP2420 for the much less powerful FreeScale MX300-30-based chips which lack the much needed dedicated GPU for programmers to be able to implement nice graphics without having to sacrifice application performance.

Very true and very relevant. Nokia's decision to base the last two generations of Symbian phones on a single ARM11 with DSP extensions has probably helped keep costs down, but definately at the expense of graphics performance. If you look at a phone like the N97 running most any application be it JAVA or native C++, you would probably see at least a 25% increase in general performance over the N95. But a well coded native application that takes advantage of the N95's Power VR MBX graphics chip, well… you might see a five-fold increase in graphics performance. It makes you wonder how many more impressive native Symbian apps there would be (or to put it another way, how many more developers would be willing to put in the extra effort) if Nokia had stuck with a Texas Instruments and their System on Chip solutions.

Totally agree. It's easy to underestimate good font usage.

A LOT more games, demos, video players would beneft from the PowerVR MBX, hell, it powers the PSP, and sadly the loss of the GPU is probably what killed N-Gage 2.0.

Samsung actually did release a few firmware updates to the Omnia HD during the early months, not sure abouth afterwards though… On the subject of firmware, they should have use a unified firmware platform for all devices, i.e., all devices use the same firmware, and it would truly live up to the s60's “Open to New Features” as older phones get FP upgrades. Obviously, you can't put animations on say the N91, but i'm pretty sure the N93/N93i would love them, and the new music player would be a good upgrade to all phones!

I'm using the Google Droid Sans Fonts for the time being… I also use it my in word docs and the monotype version in my IRC client

But they won't let you put any third party apps, so its a m00t point

Totally agree. It's easy to underestimate good font usage.

A LOT more games, demos, video players would beneft from the PowerVR MBX, hell, it powers the PSP, and sadly the loss of the GPU is probably what killed N-Gage 2.0.

Samsung actually did release a few firmware updates to the Omnia HD during the early months, not sure abouth afterwards though… On the subject of firmware, they should have use a unified firmware platform for all devices, i.e., all devices use the same firmware, and it would truly live up to the s60's “Open to New Features” as older phones get FP upgrades. Obviously, you can't put animations on say the N91, but i'm pretty sure the N93/N93i would love them, and the new music player would be a good upgrade to all phones!

I'm using the Google Droid Sans Fonts for the time being… I also use it my in word docs and the monospace version in my IRC client

But they won't let you put any third party apps, so its a m00t point

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With gravity, how does everyone read the links posted in twitter? do you just mark it as a favourite then goto twitter in opera mini? trying to find the nicest way to do it as on my ipod touch i use tweetie and that integrates with readitlater

When you click a link in Gravity, you get the option to save it to your clipboard – you can do that, then launch Opera and paste it in. I don't personally do that (I rather like the default browser personally) but that's why the clipboard option is in there.

Yup, as Ricky suggested, I usually click on the link to save it to my clipboard, then switch to Opera Mini/Mobile and paste it in the URL tab.

What you can do to improve this experience is to go into the Options / Account Settings in Gravity and move to the last tab Tweet Menu. Under URL Options, you can de-select everything except Copy to Clipboard. That way, when you click on a link in Gravity, it autom copies it to the clipboard without giving you the pop-up menu. Next, you just switch to Opera and paste it. I use this method almost 10 times a day and saves a lot of clicks and time.

Oh and for the record, you can also use the Instapaper option, Instapaper being a very similar service to Read It Later, with also an ipod touch app, so u can keep ur links in sync b/w the phone and the ipod.

Thanks for the tips guys, just going to give instapaper a go. Means I could read tweets from the e71 and just do a grab with instapaper off the ipod touch later.

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