In Depth Overview of Jolla Sailfish UI

Sailfish! One of “The” fastest fish ever lived in the known universe!

Jaakko Roppola : “The OS is running smooth on a rather old hardware (Nokia N950)”

Imagine! How flawless and how smooth and how lightweight this OS is that in year 2012 it can be installed on a hardware from 2009 frankly.

Sailfish OS is simply based on one of the greatest OSes ever developed; MeeGo! Imagine having the best OS ever, the combining it with one better which is basically the same but more developed and more refined. This one is called Mer. After all these combinations Jolla added some spices like plain simplicity and ease of use for both user and developer! How cool is that?

You can already see where this is going, can’t you?
It’s like growing a baby and nurturing him/her in the simplest and the best way possible. It’s gonna be amazing when he grows up.

And this is exactly what is happening in Jolla’s headquarters, They are growing and nurturing their own baby from the scratch and they are constantly telling the baby to be the best in the world! it is difficult to be frank, but possible as Jolla is demonstrating for us now days.

The User Interface Philosophy on Sailfish :

Jolla’s definition of the Sailfish UI is plain simplicity and modern gestures. There are no buttons unlike the others, There’s no specific UI for apps unlike the others, There’s pure openness; unlike the others ! and simply everything is there, but unlike the others!

The User Interface Overview :

The first thing you notice on this demo below is the “Double-Tap to open” feature which we all had on our MeeGo devices (N9s and N950s) from last year and we absolutely loved it until now and as you would imagine Jolla has listened to the community and simply added this handy feature to their devices. Interesting, isn’t it? The first part made by Jolla and idea given by people! It’s a rather good customer satisfaction policy to listen carefully to the customer.

The second thing is the Notification area on the lock screen which is absolutely phenomenon by it’s looks! You can swipe your lock screen to your left to see all notifications OR you can hold an icon (Message, IM, Missed Call, Email, etc.) and swipe that particular icon to the left so you can see notifications for that actual icon you’ve selected! Amazing, isn’t it?

Actually, they haven’t officially announced anything about their notification area but from the video below you can see a sort of sneak peak when Jaakko Roppola is demonstrating the UI in Finnish.

If you take a look at 9:01 which is the last few seconds of the video you can see Jaakko sliding her finger to the left on the lock screen and some text appears next to the missed call and message icon. That’s impressive!

Although there are a lot of impressive stuff in this video. If you remember when Jussi Hurmola was the CEO of Jolla he said Sailfish OS will be more than opening and closing applications; no one actually understood what he meant but now you can already see what he was on about.
Actually what Jussi tried to tell us was that they are going to create a masterpiece of true multitasking. You’ve probably at least had a go with a Nokia N9 or N900 otherwise you wouldn’t be here! Well on N900 you could even leave a video which was playing before and while it was playing you could do many other things like texting or taking a note! Nokia N9 on the other hand was a bit different, it was real time multitasking but for saving energy and saving the RAM of the device the app was on a sort of slow motion way when you put it in the task manager page, and all you could do was opening the app and do whatever you want with the app and then minimize it again. It is undeniable innovation but still on today’s market it lacks something… something which Jolla’s Sailfish is now capable of!

Imagine you’re listening to your music and the music player is running on background, someone distracts you and you have to take your headphone off so obviously in most occasions you will pause the music by going into your music application and pressing the pause button! But not in Sailfish anymore!

 

As you could see in demos like the one above, there’s a tile/widget/thumbnail of your open application in the home view that you can interact with it while the app is in background. “It’s not about opening and closing apps anymore” that means your applications is already open and you don’t need to worry about it. Back to the Music player story: You can actually pause the music or go to the next song by just swiping your finger on that tile or whatever you want to call it. There are sort of instructions on the tile for you to completely understand what swiping left or right will do for you.

It is a fabulous design and innovation to be frank.

The next thing which is undeniably noticeable is the new Pully menu which is simply a menu which the user pulls it from the top of the screen when it’s available (There’s a glow on the top of the page like a neon light if there’s any Pully Menu available) and it has various amount of options for the application such as sharing capabilities and stuff like this. The Pully menu responds you with vibration and sound feedback so as they say you can choose items without even looking at the phone. This is simply unbelievable because every touch phone around has this weird thing that you have to look at what you’re doing! because it’s so widespread that if you tap on something else it will do completely different thing that you wouldn’t even expect! But here in the Pully menu which is a very big innovation, you can do whatever you want by just knowing the place of your chosen option in your mind.

Ambiance: Is quite simply the most entertaining and personal part of Sailfish OS! Ambiance in Sailfish is something like a theme in other devices like Symbian for instance, but only much much more interesting!
You see when you change a theme on a device it changes the color, icons, background probably and many things. But ambiance is about harmony! You can activate it by going into your gallery application, Select a picture and tap on it. pull down the Pully menu and it responds you with a feedback of vibration and sound which tells you you have selected the first option that was ambiance! Then the only thing needs to be done is releasing the menu and it’ll triggers the ambiance option right away and what it does is that it changes the entire phone for you! it sees what color is your photo (What color it has in it the most!) then it changes the background of the actual home screen and also the background of user’s applications, then the whole color scheme of your phone changes itself to the color most used in the background, only brighter! and less transparent. It simply makes your phone the most personal phone ever because whenever you want to  do it, it’s a few taps away!

Overall Conclusion: 

Well, What can I say more about the innovation and goodness in this OS, I haven’t worked with it personally but I will soon. Even if you’re the most uninterested bloke in the world, this OS will amaze you more than any OS around in the market. That really concludes my article and oh.. by the way! for people who want to have Sailfish on their N9s; I can assure you that it’ll be released soon and hackers will port it FULLY FUNCTIONAL on N9 and N950. But sadly there’s no official support from Jolla themselves.

 

Hope you loved the article and my way of writing! And here’s another demo video on a Nokia N950 in which you can see the ambiance quite easily. Enjoy!