Let’s take a positive outlook on RIM for a second, starting with BlackBerry 10 OS features of interest:
The Cascades SDK provides a full set of native UI elements which can easily be added to your applications: buttons, fields, text areas etc.
The screens look nice, like a point set somewhere betwee Ice Cream Sandwich and Windows Phone 7. If nothing else, the design is modern and makes iOS stand out as “the different one” among its competitors.
Next:
Small, non-intrusive, signature effects that result in a fun and inviting experience – even with check boxes – is what makes Cascades great!
Animations, when used carefully can add personality to a UI design. The exclaimation point makes me a little nervous, though. Will the effects have the same tone?
Finally:
The Cascades SDK is built using client-server architecture where the client handles all UI is handled by the client thread and the server thread handles all the heavy lifting (data processing, networking etc). To the end user, this means that even if the server is working hard to process data, the client will stay responsive and extremely lag-resistant.
And there it is. The holy grail of touch OS design: responsiveness. It’s what makes iOS feel subtly, inexplicably better to the average consumer. If this is true, and BB10 is as responsive as iOS while also looking more modern, RIM might have actually had something good after all this time.
But between the “Wake Up” campaign and the strange development device situation for BB10 I wonder if any number of features will be too little too late.
Via: Ars Technica
