Jonesing for another taste of Jolla's Sailfish operating system? The company that's made up of ex-Nokia N9 team members and other MeeGo community members recently previewed Sailfish for Engadget, and the resulting video gives us our longest look at the new OS yet. In the demo, which is done using a Nokia N950 developer device, Jolla shows off both the basic parts Sailfish (like its lock and home screens) as well as how users will get around inside the OS.
As we noted when we last got a peek at Sailfish, there's a heavy focus on gestures here. Users can pull down on the lock screen for access to a Pulley Menu with things like the phone and camera apps, while pulling up shows the phone's battery and signal strength. Sliding all the way up from the lock screen brings users to their home screen. Once inside an app, pulling down will bring up a menu, giving users options to do things like edit or delete a person's information while viewing a contact. Swiping left to right in an app will take users back a screen, slowly swiping right to left will peek at a notifications list and going all the way from right to left will go back to the device's home screen.
While on the home screen, a user is presented with some docked apps at the bottom of the display as well as some cards of apps that are running in the background. Jolla says that Sailfish supports true multitasking, and these cards can show a user information related to the running app and can also be interacted with. For example, a music player app allows users to swipe left to right for play/pause functionality and right to left to change tracks. Swiping up from the bottom of the home screen will bring up an app list. Jolla also demos its ambience feature of Sailfish in the clip, which allows a user to alter the colors of the UI based on a selected wallpaper photo.
When it first announced Sailfish earlier this year, Jolla said that it's been working on the MeeGo-based OS since 2011. Details on when Sailfish will be released to the public are still light, as is information on what hardware the new OS will be running on whenever it does launch. Still, Sailfish does appear to be coming together nicely, and it'll be interesting to see how the final product performs and what Jolla's plan of attack is for spreading its new OS around the world. The eight minute video demo of Sailfish is available below to keep you occupied until we hear more.
Via Engadget
