Google’s new Fuchsia OS just got a novel card-based UI called Armadillo
Google’s new Fuchsia OS just got a novel card-based UI called Armadillo
Last August, news broke that Google was working on a mysterious OS known as “Fuchsia”. It was uncovered in command line form, so it was clearly in its very early stages, but it now has a proper user interface that may offer up details on its intended applications.
Unlike Android and Chrome OS that are based on Linux, Fuchsia features a new, Google-built microkernel called “Magenta”.
According to Google’s documentation, Magenta targets “modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAM with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation”.
That aside, Google is still tight-lipped as to what the Fuchsia OS is for, although the “modern phone” reference with regard to Magenta appears to suggest that it could be a mobile OS that may go up against Android.
One interesting thing is that the Fuchsia UI is written with the cross-platform Flutter SDK, which actually allows you to compile it and run it on an Android device. Dubbed Armadillo, the UI appears to be a smartphone or tablet-centric OS with an unconventional home screen, to say the least.
The UI revolves around a card-based design, where the home screen is a large vertically scrolling list that sits below certain “Story” cards, much like Android’s existing Recent Apps screen. Below the home screen is a scrolling list of suggestions, which Ars Technica likened to a Google Now placeholder.
The home screen itself hosts a profile picture, date, city name, and battery icon, and tapping on the profile picture calls up a settings menu much like Android’s Quick Settings, with things like volume and brightness sliders and battery, connectivity, and auto-rotate icons.
On the other hand, the Story cards are supposedly a set of apps or modules that work together to help you achieve a goal, and tapping on any card calls up a full-screen interface. In addition, there’s support for some multi-tasking features like a split-screen mode with multiple configurations.
Fuchsia is still very rough around the edges, and it’s not entirely clear what it’s intended for, but Fuchsia developer Travis Geiselbrecht has said that the OS “isn’t a toy thing” or some other half-hearted effort.
At the very least, that’s reassurance that Google intends to take the project somewhere and isn’t just experimenting for the fun of it. The most ambitious outcome would be a mobile OS that replaces Android, but Google would face huge challenges in working out a transition plan given that Android is now the world’s most popular OS.
Source: Ars Technica