Cesium
A calendar application for a handheld computer, created for Sven Anderson's software interface design course, November 2003

 

Handheld computers are becoming increasingly popular for organization of contacts, notes, and calendar events. Yet there are still issues with viewing and entering data on these compact devices. Cesium is a schedule application in which I explored some of these issues.

Cesium condenses the day, week, and month views into one view with varying degrees of magnification. The currently selected day is the largest item on the screen (large enough to contain boxes with text labels which represent that day's events). The second largest items are the other days of the currently selected week, which can display boxes for current events without labels. Below the currently selected week are even smaller boxes representing the following three weeks. This view allows multiple levels of detail to be viewed at once. The currently selected day is shown with the most detail, and the current week and next three weeks are shown with decreasing levels of detail.

By eliminating the different views in the application, navigation is reduced to incrementing or decrementing by day. The Clié's scroll wheel is used for navigation: rolling the wheel down increments the selected day, while rolling the wheel away decrements it.

Side view of the Sony Clié, showing the scroll wheel and back button.

Cesium is not a finished application — not all the interaction has been implemented. The finished application will have stylus input and a more refined method for adding events. However, this application was intended for exploring interaction with scroll wheels and resolution issues on a handheld computer screen.