[Wolfman]

I really want to know... what do Commlinks look like. Especially the Fairlight Caliban. A picture or a drawing would be really cool...

[The_Gun_Nut]

The best visual I had for a 'link is a smart phone + a set of sunglasses.

[CanRay]

The major thing I enjoy about the ebooks, they're firearm/vehicle/drone/gear porn!   

But, yes, I see them as smart phones as well, with various accessories that I like, such as bracer typepads.

[Angelone]

I remember seeing one in some artwork somewhere. Maybe the cover of Unwired on the dudes belt.

It kinda looked like a walkie talkie.

[Wolfman]

Ok... I started working on a little something...
Now, what I need is to figure out the... "menu" portion...
Like Notepad has:
File/new/open/save/save as/
Edit/undo/cut/copy/paste
...And whatnot.

Now what would a Fairlight Caliban, decked out to the max with everything rat.6, look like "menu-wise" ?

[DesVoeux]

Oh, you said Fairlight Caliban... my bad.

There really isn't much in the way of commlink art. You have two pictures of what I'm guessing are supposed to be commlinks on page 328 of SR4A (one looks like a walkie-talkie, one... like a scroll?) and a picture of what I think is a commlink on page 48 of Unwired. There is a whole lot of art that depicts what looks like wrist-mounted commlinks, but nothing specific. They're usually described as accessories that you can pretty much clip/wear anywhere... not like the hulking cyberdecks of old.

As to menus and such, that's all done in AR for the most part... hence all the Minority Report style data entry you see in the art. The operating systems can be assumed to be virtually idiot proof and very intuitive... so I don't think you'd be looking at a lot of menus.

[Wolfman]

So a decker with a Custom OS on his commlink could have menus on it since he pretty much knows what he's doing, right?

[DesVoeux]

I don't even know if you'd need a custom OS, as I'm sure the UI of any given OS is very flexible. But if you're using a custom OS you can, of course, set it up however you want. Go wild!

[Wolfman]

Any suggestion?

[CanRay]

Iconography is the term used as the "New Literacy" that most people have, with Shadowrunners being a strangely intelligent and literate percentile of the population due to their self-taught, DIY attitude.

Voice commands and typing, intuitive icons, simplistic controls, even clerks that "Type" for a living are likely to use a 'Trode or Datajack, and do so at the speed of thought.  A lack of literacy is good for the Megacorporations.  The less people think...

Well, I think we've all read the Shadowtalk.

[Wolfman]

Makes sense en esti (pardon my french )
Guess I'll go create some pretty little icons then

[CanRay]

Custom OSes will likely have written menus as well as icons.  Stock OSes are more likely to have just Iconography.

[FastJack]

Closest picture I know of is the cover of the SR4 core rulebook (not the Anniversary). The dwarf hacker's holding a commlink and it looks kinda like a smartphone/pda.

[Fortinbras]

Also keep in mind that Sixth World computers are so complex that nodes have an entire sculpture and metaphor.
Instead of thinking like modern OS design, design a metaphor concept, like an old western or Wonderful Wizard of Oz with each of the icons representing programs and files. Even in AR, this is how people are able to interact with such massive amounts of data.

My hacker used The Great Gatsby, which was fun in Cybercombat.

[CanRay]

There's also the fact that there would be different cases for CommLinks, just like there's different cases for desktop and laptop computers today.  Or even cell phones.  Each one looking different.

Some look like beige boxes.  Others look like something out of H.G. Wells' Opium Dreams.  Some look like something that would give H.P. Lovecraft nightmares.  Some look like (And possibly can) stop bullets.