Inside the honeycomb hideout
When it comes to Windows Mobile 6.5's honeycomb home screen, chances are you're on one side of the fence, or the other. You either lover it, or you hate it.
But IStartedSomething's Long Zheng has taken a look at the design aspect of the honeycomb, and it makes sense. We noted on one of the early leaked ROMs that the honeycomb eliminated the need for scroll bars; you can simply see that there's more above or below. But it goes a little deeper than that.
Zheng points out that when your finger hits a touchscreen, it does so as a circle, and not a square. (Can't say the same for my companion lovebot, but that's another story.) And the most efficient way to get more of the round icons — or in this case, hexagons — is what Zheng calls sphere packing. You overlap them a bit.
A grid is the most efficient method to pack as many squares into an area as possible, but not for circles. The mathematically most efficient method to arrange non-overlapping circles - a problem called “sphere packing” - is actually and as you might have guessed by now, hexagonal.
It all has something to do with math and pies and other stuff during which we nodded off in high school. But one thing's for certain: The honeycomb's coming, one way or another.
Via jkontherun
