Dynamic User Interface For Mobiles

France : Mobile software specialist Digital Airways introduces Kaleido, a graphic solution that allows handset manufacturers to design and implement a dynamic User Interface (UI) on mobile phones.

Kaleido offers flexibility and complete ease in defining, implementing and updating a phone’s user interface, including over-the-air, without programming. With Kaleido, handset manufacturers dramatically reduce the cost and time-to-market of UI design and implementation, while gaining complete flexibility to produce customized phones.

The user interface has become a key challenge for handset manufacturers. "As phones increasingly take on more sophisticated functions, they risk becoming more complex to the user. At the same time, operators and content providers are looking for customization features to improve usability of services and promote branded content" says Philippe Silberzahn, co-founder and CEO of Digital Airways. "The user interface has become central to the success of new generation mobile services".

Until now, however, the UI has been implemented as a static layer over the operating system at manufacturing time. This approach made it complex and expensive for manufacturers to quickly respond to market changes and to adapt the UI to users’ or operators’ evolving needs.

With Kaleido, Digital Airways adopts a dynamic approach for the user interface: instead of hard-coding the UI into the software layer of the handset, Kaleido separates its definition from its implementation. This allows manufacturers to create handsets that can completely change their UI without re-programming. A new UI only requires a new description file, which can be produced in a few hours.

Kaleido comprises a suite of three products, which are called Kaleido Design, Kaleido Viewer and Wapaka UI Service.

Kaleido Design is a design tool that allows designers of mobile phones to create a user interface on a PC without programming. New menus, screens, behaviors or items are added with a simple drag and drop. UI features can be modified in minutes, and immediately tested for validation. Kaleido Design automatically creates the description file that is used to implement the actual UI on the phone.
Kaleido Viewer is a rendering application running on PC that lets the designer visualize a UI that has been created with Kaleido Design. Kaleido Viewer is used to test the UI, discuss it among the design team and validate it.
Wapaka UI Service is a rendering engine that runs on the phone. It implements the UI as defined by the description file created with Kaleido Design. Wapaka UI Service is written in Java. It is a UI-specific extension of Wapaka, Digital Airways’ popular Java micro-browser.
The benefits of the Kaleido approach are numerous: it makes it easier and faster to create a new phone’s interface, thanks to the absence of code writing (Kaleido Design tool is a graphic application); it brings greater flexibility to produce customized phones at very low development cost (use the same generic UI engine), hence provides the ability for OEM phone manufacturers to faster and better respond to mobile operators' needs in terms of UI; it ensures a better quality: thanks to the Java technology, defining and updating a device's UI involves no programming and no loading of new binary code onto the device: the UI Engine code is generic and independent from a particular UI. The description file is specific to a particular UI, but it is generated automatically and does not contain code; Finally, because it is written in Java, the interface engine is easily portable to a new handset. In conclusion, Kaleido brings about new opportunities for customization and creation of branded phones as new user interfaces can be downloaded over-the-air (OTA).

Providing customization capabilities on the phone has become absolutely key for manufacturers. Until now, however, they lacked the appropriate tools to design their phones for customization. "Kaleido provides the perfect tools for handset manufacturers to address the growing challenges and opportunities of mobile phones’ user interface" adds Silberzahn.