Mobile design/Wikipedia navigation/Re-think

From mediawiki.org

This captures some of the design ideas in a new Wikipedia app for Windows Phone 7.

Windows Phone Wikipedia app[edit]

http://www.wpcentral.com/new-indie-wikipedia-app-windows-phone-sets-bar-quality

Home screen[edit]

The Home screen is awesome. Well worth borrowing a few ideas from, like the sliding selector at the top that goes Home, History, Favorites, More, back to Home (endless loop).

UI details[edit]

Lots of UI niceties, like the fleeting and animated progress indicator, progressive loading in a totally smooth way that lags just behind scrolling, clean typography, seems to handle tables better, dark theme that uses gray not black, very graphical share menu, highlight of current section name in table of contents, footnotes opens a window at the top, and...

Toolbar[edit]

a toolbar that is fixed position on the bottom, but also the 3-dots "more" icon opens it up into a kind of menu, which by the way includes article history. Here are the commands below the same toolbar icons (which have captions in the open menu):

  • open with Internet Explorer
  • view previous versions
  • use dark theme
  • back to home

Home is where the "real" menu items are.

Brion: Has some very nice integration with the phone Metro style; the swiping menus that rotate around to the beginning are very WinPhone-native looking, as is the application menu bar at the bottom.