Thanks to TechCrunch for cap­tur­ing some video of App Store visu­al­iza­tion on dis­play at Apple’s WWDC con­fer­ence this week. A mas­sive grid of iPhone appli­ca­tion icons, arranged by color, pul­sates as each app is pur­chased through the App Store.

Two new appli­ca­tions for iPhone (I refuse to write “apps”) pro­vide joy through typo­graphic explo­ration, both free from the App Store. For All Seasons is an inter­ac­tive poem with swirling, three-dimensional type.

And Font Shuffle a new pro­gram from Font Shop that picks ran­dom type­faces for you in a vari­ety of styles, I guess for when you’re jog­ging or sit­ting on the sub­way in need of some let­ter­form inspiration.

People have been talk­ing about resolution-independent user inter­faces for years — such a UI would grace­fully scale larger and smaller, and look good on any dis­play, whether an old 72 ppi CRT or a higher-resolution 163 ppi iPhone.

But I’ve never heard any­one dream of, let alone imple­ment, an ori­en­ta­tion-inde­pen­dent inter­face, one in which text and other ele­ments would always be dis­played “upright” from the user’s per­spec­tive, regard­less of the phys­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion of the dis­play in space.

The cre­ators of the new iPhone game Dizzy Bee have done just that, how­ever, and the exe­cu­tion is com­pletely flaw­less. Just as the iPhone itself has set the stan­dard for multi-touch inter­faces, Dizzy Bee has bro­ken new ground and estab­lished a suc­cess­ful struc­ture for future orientation-independent UIs.

Here’s how it works: UI ele­ments rotate freely so that their bot­toms point down in the phys­i­cal world, as detected by the iPhone’s accelerom­e­ter. This is appro­pri­ate, given that the game itself is played by rotat­ing the phys­i­cal device in order to direct the bee (and other ele­ments) as they “fall” in the direc­tion of grav­ity. Here’s an exam­ple of the UI shown between lev­els — this is one of the islands around which Dizzy Bee navigates:

And here’s that same screen, as it appears when I rotate the device around 180 degrees:

Notice how, while the island and com­pass rose remain fixed on the dis­play (so they appear “upside down” here), all the text ele­ments rotate to stay “upright.” Here’s a shot of the screen that appears when you com­plete a level:

Here’s that same screen, but I’ve tilted the device 225 degrees clockwise:

From this, I will infer four new guide­lines for suc­cess­ful orientation-independent interfaces:

1. Each UI element’s top and bot­tom edges must be defined.
2. A point at which the rota­tion occurs must be specified.
3. Elements should be placed so as not to over­lap too much, no mat­ter the rotation.
4. Background graph­ics should be appro­pri­ate at any rotation.

And as if a ground-breaking UI weren’t enough, Dizzy Bee is also just really fun to play, with cute graph­ics, great sound design, and lots of puz­zling lev­els to play through — for only $2.99! See it in action here:

I’m sure every­one and their moth­ers have already blogged this, but here are the lin­ger­ing ques­tions I have fol­low­ing today’s WWDC keynote:

• A new remote “erase” fea­ture was alluded to dur­ing the enter­prise por­tion of the pre­sen­ta­tion. How will this work, and who con­trols it? If I’m late pay­ing my AT&T bill, try to break my con­tract, or try to unlock the phone for use with another car­rier, will the phone self-destruct?

• Apple announced a new push noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vice for devel­oper use, but I’m guess­ing it ain’t free. How much will it cost, and who can use it? Will small, inde­pen­dent devel­op­ers be priced out of the pic­ture? And is it part of the new Mobile Me ser­vice, or can it oper­ate on its own, serv­ing users who don’t have $99/year Mobile Me accounts?

• How much will my monthly 3G phone bill cost? (More, presumably.)

• Is 3G ser­vice even avail­able in my area? How can I find out before pur­chas­ing a new phone?

• Will Mobile Me’s push email ser­vice work only with me.com email accounts? (I’m guess­ing yes, which means I wouldn’t be able to use it with alignedleft.com.)

• How does the new Mail app’s UI for multiple-message delete/move work? This is new func­tion­al­ity for iPhone, but it won’t be use­ful unless it’s also usable.

• Same ques­tion for the mul­ti­ple lan­guage sup­port: How does the UI work for switch­ing languages/keyboards? And can the hand­writ­ing recog­ni­tion used for Chinese char­ac­ter input be expanded for use with other alphabets?

Also, Jobs men­tioned that the audio qual­ity had been improved sig­nif­i­cantly. It will be inter­est­ing to hear if that’s really the case.

Update: I also want to add one obser­va­tion that I haven’t seen made else­where yet:

• It looks like iPhone 2.0 sup­ports mul­ti­ple iCal cal­en­dars, which was not men­tioned in the keynote (nor on Apple’s site). This will be great, as it brings my iPhone cal­en­dar more in line, visu­ally, with my desk­top iCal cal­en­dar. (I hope this also elim­i­nates the bug/feature of hav­ing new events entered on the phone sync unpre­dictably into the last cal­en­dar in iCal’s list.)

A new game called Trism is in devel­op­ment. It looks like Bejeweled, only the col­or­ful blocks are tri­an­gles, and the UI more inter­est­ing because it uses touch-dragging and direc­tional tilt­ing of the device to manip­u­late the game. So as you match up blocks and they dis­ap­pear, new blocks slide “down,” depend­ing on which way “down” is in real life. (Sort of like Connect Four, except that in Connect Four, there is only one “down.”) So you can rotate the iPhone around in order to affect how new blocks slide into the game. Take a look at the video. It’s an inno­v­a­tive new UI.

iPhone-related bonus link: iPhone Stopwatch Hits 1,000 Hours, the geeki­est video I have seen in a long time. Maybe ever.