Quince on the iPhone!

Okay, before you get all giddy, no, it’s not the full Quince exploration and participation experience you get on devices that support Silverlight 2.  BUT, we did recently add a plain ol’ HTML entry point to get you to all the great Quince UX design pattern content on the iPhone (and other mobile Web devices).

If you approach Quince and say “hi” on a device that does not have Silverlight installed, you’ll see this view, inviting you to join the club of super-hip Quince users by just installing Silverlight.  And FYI, Silverlight does, despite all the silly rumors to the contrary, run on modern Macs (and Windows, too! :-p). 

But if you can’t install Silverlight (note I don’t say “won’t”—good designers don’t let tech prejudice keep them from improving themselves), you can still get to the pattern content chewy center—there’s a link in that info box on the homepage that takes you to the list of the Quince UX design patterns in HTML.

They’re big enough you can just tap the pattern info boxes at this resolution with no problem (on the iPhone), and the thumbnails have been individually created for each pattern to be as meaningful as we can make them in that small rectangular space.  If you try, you can make out the pattern names without zooming, and if you flip to landscape, you can also read the solution descriptions without zooming. 

Then just tap on one to bring it up.  I selected Transition (Quince|HTML).

If you want, you just double-tap the content, and it zooms in and is quite readable.  Cool!  Not bragging--I really think this is cool for my own purposes.. like if I need to quickly reference a UX design pattern in, say, a meeting where I’m away from my laptop/desktop, I can now do so in just a couple taps!  And of course, now there’s also no barrier to the patterns if you can’t install Silverlight for any other reason.

Enjoy!

P.S. By the way, this is an implementation of Alternative Views (Quince|HTML).  We have three alternative views: the interactive pattern viewer (in Silverlight), the HTML view, and the print view.  If you want to print a pattern, just open it in HTML and print; we have a style sheet to make it print a bit better than it does by default.  We’ve had Alternative Views from Day 1—you can just use the Popout button in the interactive pattern viewer, but we just recently added the HTML entrypoint/list of patterns to help those who, sadly :o(, cannot run Silverlight.  More power to ya!

Update (later that day): I just added a home screen shortcut to the Quince patterns list page on my iPhone.  I’m so pumped!