This is by far the coolest thing that I saw at BlackBerry Jam Asia 2013. Our good friend Gary Klassen, inventor of BBM, had a session on Tilt UI, a part of Cascades that's available now and allows developers to use device orientation to show useful information. This hearkens back to something the old TAT crew made years ago called Horizon.
In one demo app, users can keep tabs on meeting minutes and ensure that attendees don't spend too long talking on individual topics. Tapping and dragging the timer circle can either shorten the amount of time, extend it, or end the topic. The magic happens when you tilt the device up from the table. The more you tilt it, the more information about upcoming meeting items is displayed.
The other app is a way of sneaking a peak at the latest sports scores when your device is face-down on a table. The latest information is displayed as a flip image on the screen so you can see the scores the right way around in the reflection on the table as you start to lift your phone up. More and more match info shows up as you increase the tilt, until you fully flip your phone around and view the full text of what's going on. If there was a new update when you first tilted the phone up, it would glow blue, but if nothing was new, it wouldn't glow at all. This could be a very handy way to look like you're being conscientious of others that you're socializing with while still stealing a few glances at your phone.
The nice thing about all of this is that it's current available through Cascades already. The sample code Gary talks about should be available on Github soon. Between this, the rocking chair game, and all of the other cool stuff BlackBerry Sweden churns out, it's obvious that TAT was among BlackBerry's smartest investments, and will be an invaluable resource in the months ahead. Anybody interested in the nitty-gritty can find Gary's presentation slides over here.
Developers, have you played around with tilt in these kinds of ways before? The rest of y'all, would you like to see these two demos available as public apps rather than tech demos? Scrapbook was made available on the PlayBook, and I imagine at least a few folks would get use out of these apps.
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