Embedded Systems Design
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- popovich
Anyone has ever done an interface for a navigation hardware (like, TomTom) or mobile phones or TV sets? Any references to follow? Any agencies to look at? Any clues?
- WeLoveNoise0
might be a studio to look out for
http://www.ustwo.co.uk/
- popovich0
thanks!
how about anyone with a hands-on experience? anyone out there?
- popovich0
bumping up and expanding on the point of interest....
OK, so I knew the guy, who was involved into the interface design for Mercedes and Blaupunkt navigation hardware. I knew him not very well, though we have met couple of times at his office. He never looked like a programmer and I am pretty sure he didn't do anything with C++ or any other coding language; he was more into the graphics part of the business. Typefaces for the screen, icons, probably screen sequence design as well. The last time I've seen his table, he was working on an interface and there was a bare LCD screen on a circuit attached to his Mac and he explained, that this will be a navigation system for a Mercedes one day.
That was, like, 5 years ago.So what does the process look like these days? Say, a programmer comes to a designer and says he would like to have a kick-ass interface for a handheld. What would a designer need (software, hardware, skills?) How would the processes of designing and inplementing the UI split between the two? How one tests what the other has done?...
I know how this sounds — and this is exactly it. I have no clue, and I want to know.
- vaxorcist0
I've worked with a guy who used to do this. He said it's often VERY restricted, according to the device. The device manufacturer usually has a dev kit with very specific things you can do, so he suggested looking at all the existing applications on that device/platform and get a feeling for what can be done with the device.
He said that the way they did things was to wireframe, develop, then design the "skin" of buttons and such, he said the worst way to do this is to make a bunch of photoshop comps and then develop based on those, as you can easily do things in photoshop that you can't do in the device.
I know designers like to be original, but devices can be more limited than you think....
- popovich0
Well, some limitations designing for closed systems are more obvious then others. However, this makes it even more interesting for me.
vaxo, any clues on where one clueless thing like me could get more information? if it is not QBN, these designers ought to hang out somewhere, right?
- vaxorcist0
Depends on the device... is it a very vendor-oriented closed loop kind of thing, or is it more open-source. If it's the first, then you may have a hard time finding community, as people often have to sign NDA's in order to get a development kit. The second can be great, as there are often emulators freely available to run on a PC, sometimes even a mac or linux machine... and lots of discussion boards on them too.. though questions tend to be more "how do I do this " thing than what you may want....
can you say more about the device?
- popovich0
it might be a mobile phone, a communication device, at some point of time.... I have at least two potential doors, where I could knock on, if I knew where to start.
- welded0
I did a job for OpenTV, the kind of thing where you navigate hotspots on the screen with a remote, and it sucked... The hardware was extremely slow to the point where firing events on hover or running a function with setInterval would slow everything down and cause some odd display issues, like black bands to stretch the entire width of the display. What's more, the browser was some custom job by a team in China that was fairly competent but I couldn't help but wish they just used Gecko or WebKit instead. On top of all this their API documentation was rather unhelpful.
It was an interesting experience, in a way, but I wouldn't want to do it again.
- vaxorcist0
Welded's right, it's often full of ideosyncracies, and custom handmade software. Often these devices are made by companies who prohibit using any GPL software, so things get re-invented, sometimes not as good.
The guy I knew said the device he worked on used a custom image tiling system, he basically had to learn from scratch, except that he'd done some gameboy advance stuff years ago and could re-use some of the ideas from that gig.... they both had very tight memory requirements. But there were emulators on PC's he could use, so he didn't have to burn an EPROM each time....
Some Mobile phones are more standardized, especially Google Android and iPhone have communities and API docs. Whereas some other phones are totally vendor-supplied language/docs/learn from scratch...
- popovich0
I see.
I have found that guy I was talking about earlier on other network. See, if he wants to expand on his experience over a coffee... :)
Thanks for your help anyway.
- vaxorcist0
that guy will probably have some interesting stories....
- winnie_the_shit0
Just designs, no actual implementation.