Like Dustin mentioned in his latest post, Origami Experience™ is the newer, cooler, more functional version of the Program Launcher. Not only can you quickly open your programs, files, folders, or websites, but now you can now easily access your media content. Last but not least, we’ve listened to your feedback, and integrated all of the configuration tools directly into the application. No more extra applets to manage!

Okay, so enough intro. On to the good stuff.

Home

By default, when you open Origami Experience, it opens to the Home screen. This is the landing page where you can quickly access Music, Videos, Pictures, Programs, and Settings.

In almost every screen within Origami Experience, you have immediate access to the playback controls at the bottom, and the title bar controls at the top. In addition to the typical media controls, you’ll also see that the last song or video that you were playing is already queued up (whether an individual track or playlist), so you can resume playback immediately after launching the application. In the screen above, the last thing I played was the song OAM’s Blues by Aaron Goldberg so it was queued up for me when Origami Experience started.

Along the top of the screen, the Home button will always return you to the screen above. From left-to-right, the next button along the top is the Window Switcher button. When you tap it, up comes the Windows Vista on-screen alt-tab window which allows to quickly access other running applications, or show the desktop:

Next is the battery indicator. Pretty self-explanatory, but when you tap it, up comes the Windows Mobility Center:

The network button shows current network status, and when tapped, opens the Connect to a network window:

And the rest of the title bar includes the time, minimize and close buttons.

Music, Pictures, and Videos

When you open Music, Videos, or Pictures, you’re taken to what we call the Now Playing screen. This screen shows you what’s currently queued up for that media type (based on what you previously played). There’s also a scrollable list of all of your playlists (Music), all videos (Videos), and slideshows (Pictures). Tapping one of the items in that list immediately starts playing the selected item.

Here is each of the Now Playing screens:

Along the left, there are 2 tab-like buttons to toggle between the Now Playing screen, and the Library. The Library contains all of the media found in the folders you have included in your Windows Media Player 11 watched folders list. If it shows up in your WMP11 library, it’ll show up in your Origami Experience library.  Here are shots of each of the Library views:

Next to each media item you’ll see a button with the Origami Experience logo. Tapping this button will add one or more media items to your Favorites list. You can play that list of items (be your own D.J. <g>), and/or save them out as a playlist. Here’s a shot of the list in action:

When playing videos, you can watch it on the Now Playing screen, or switch to full screen mode. In full screen mode, tapping the screen once will show the playback controls, a second time will switch you back to windowed mode. Here’s a shot of full screen with the playback controls:

Screenshots don’t really do the picture slideshow transitions justice, but here are a couple of them. First one is the one we refer to as mosaic or grid. Multiple pictures are shown on the screen, while they transition in different directions and cross fade, revealing the next set of pictures in your slideshow.

And here’s the one we call bulletin board. The idea here is that individual pictures are being pinned up (or dropped on a table), stacking on top of one another. The picture’s title (or filename if no title) will appear beneath each image.

Programs

Similar to the Program Launcher from the Touch Pack, the Programs view allows you to create multiple categories with shortcuts to applications, files, folders, or websites. Here’s a screen of one of the default categories:

Settings

As I alluded to earlier, we’ve integrated all of the configuration options into the Origami Experience UI. You can change the background image:

Change the default view on startup:

Add additional folders to be added to the watched folder list for your media libraries:

Change picture transitions, duration, and order:

And configure categories and shortcuts:

This isn’t a complete rundown of everything in the application, but for those of you who can’t see it in person here at CES, I wanted to get a little more out there so you can experience (ahem) it too. :)

--Sears