BlueFly - a surprising useable theme inspired by Firefly.
Here's an interesting theme I've been working on.
Anyone here seen the Firefly TV show and the movie, Serenity, that came from it? :D
I built this theme inspired by some of the UI elements used in the movie. Yes, this is a MovieOS theme- not a movie fan theme with pictures of the movie but a recreation of OS elements that were used IN the movie. I actually built it to see if there was any validity to the design because even though it looked like a MovieOS... it seemed like it had some merit as a touch UI.
Surprise, surprise. It actually does work fairly well. Well enough that I've been using it for a couple days now and don't miss the standard UI at all.
Its not finished. I want to live with it for a while and see where the rough edges rub before uploading it. I'm not expecting it to more than a novelty for a few people, anyway. Here's what I have so far. I chose the blue color to match the smoked glass theme. :D
Portrait View
First the portrait mode home screen with everything off:
(For those who have seen the movie, this design is my interpretation of the screen in Mr. Universe's "backup unit" at the end of the movie. Right after the big fight over the generator.)
There are 6 screen options, 3 on either side of the bottom. Pressing one of them pops its name out a little, activates 2 screen switches and turns one of them on. Like so:
Hitting the H2 button would replace all the content on the screen with a different set.
Hitting a different screen option replaces everything with that screen's elements- along with the 2 screen switchers for that screen.
That's pretty much the idea for the portrait screen. With 2 options for 6 screens- that's 12 different screens that are easy to access quickly with very small thumb movements. It works better than I thought it would.
Landscape View
Landscape view is designed to be used primarily while driving so the screen targets are different and larger, as are the icons. The way it works is a little different, as well, since hitting small screen switchers wouldn't work while driving.
(This is based on the ship screens on board Firefly. This is what I wanted to see in action to see if it would work at all. I want touch UI's to work better than they currently do...)
There are 3 main screen options on the left. They are all off in the screenshot only for demonstration- in actual use there are automatically activated items so the screen isn't empty. But in this case hit one of them and 3 more options for that screen pop up on the right side....
Hitting one of them populates the center screen...
Or hit a different screen option (Sys) and up pops its default content (Cntl).
In both landscape and portrait view the 6 targets for the screens are larger than the words or buttons themselves so they are pretty easy to hit - even while driving in a shakey old truck like mine. And the screens are locked so they won't slide- so if you do miss your intended button you can just drag your thumb or finger up or down and get it.
Plans
Oh, I don't know. The main thing at the moment is figuring out useful and functional ways of populating all those screens. Landscape works well... but 12 portrait screens is actually a bit much. I added the second screen option to a) use the dead space between the screen options and b) have empty screen for future users to easily do what they want with the theme. The things I actually have in place work OK, but I want to live with it a bit and see what works well and what I feel like I have to hunt for.
The Auto and Nav sections will also benefit greatly from the LiveMap option working better than it presently does - or that I am presently able to make it work.
The wallpaper is also a stand-in for the rotating earth live wallpaper. I won't hold my breath for live wallpaper support... but I think that would be cool. With actual cloud images its a fun way of seeing the larger weather patterns, too.
If there is any interest it would be fairly easy to make different colored versions of the theme, as well. Once the rest of it is dialed in. I might also replace the SH2 text/background buttons with fancier images but I'd be concerned about the theme getting too resource hungry.
Its kind of crazy how much SH2 changes what its like to interact with your android device. It feels like a completely different device.
Thanks for checking out.