One of the most compelling features of the Apple Watch is its home screen. Rather than arrange the chiclet-sized app buttons in rows, Apple (AAPL) turned the icons into circles that seem to float fluidly to the surface, like Magic 8 Ball (MAT) answers.
Intrigued by the new interface and inspired by a post on 9-to-5 Mac by Michael Steeber, a developer named Lucas Menge has figured out what the Apple Watch UI would look like on an iPhone. It’s brilliant—introducing a feeling of organic discovery to a view that has become familiar and staid. It gets exciting around 0:45:
In Menge’s prototype, instead of flipping through pages of apps, you can use your index finger to move the icons around, pinching to zoom in for a closer look. There are two special navigation features, as Menge demonstrates: When entirely zoomed out, you can tap anywhere on the screen to zoom in on that portion. If you then tap anywhere that isn’t a button, the icons recede to show the entire inventory of apps.
Menge spent three days working on the prototype and admits it’s incomplete. There are no folders or a “favorites” dock, to which iPhone users have grown accustomed, and the Brazil-based developer hasn’t explored what his model would look like on a much larger iPad screen. Taking the interface from prototype to reality would take a lot more work on Apple’s part, but Menges thinks the company could pull it off. “I’m just not sure they’d want to take their users from an interface that they’ve familiarized themselves with for the past few years into something so foreign.” And Apple has a lot riding on the continued success of its phones.
