MeeGo Handset UX style guide unveiled early (and now hidden)
"Bananas and pears", that was the oddly chosen name for a wiki document on meego.com describing the "Handset UX" user interface guidelines. These groundrules for the MeeGo system, and third party applications, were uncovered by Reggie Suplido before the wiki page was deleted. However, things of interest on the Internet never stay hidden for long, so it's still available. From the introduction, MeeGo is a direct touch UI, meaning that users manipulate objects, such as a thumbnail of an image, directly through touch interactions. Content is surfaced and navigation hierarchies should be shallow and accessed through simple navigation systems. In addition to direct touch, MeeGo is optimized for multi-tasking usage and provides a rich platform integrated Applications. The MeeGo interface is scalable for different screen sizes, resolutions, and aspect ratios and it supports both portrait and landscape orientations. In your editor’s opinion, the document seems to describe a nice mix of existing Maemo 5 features (top-left button, menus from the title) with new enrichments to improve the general flow. The principles about interaction speed and flow will be just that - principles, however hopefully redeveloping the stack from the ground up, and having complete control over Qt, will mean a much more fluid UI than has been achieved on the N900 to date.
The link below goes to the original Talk discussion thread, which now links to various mirrors, including Google Cache and Engadget.