Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Sure there is: spambots, viruses, pr0n popups, complete flash environments to display a text file; you always know when you're on the intertubes.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Different sites requires different interfaces. News sites requires minimum decoration and maximum information in one page (in device UI it will be called «admin's overkill». Entertainment sites requires lots of decoration to attract visitor.
Device UI must be something in between. Not so askethic like DOS ( =) ) but not very colorful and full of decoration details because it'll screw your brain in everyday use. It must be informative, but not OVER informative, cause too much info will disorient user. And many little details creates an image of each interface.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Most of the crap that hits me has always come across corporate INTRAnets. By far.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

You generalized, so I generalized. :D

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Yeah, we've thought about that, but it's not really feasible with our current touch screens. There are issues even with the finger/stylus detection, let alone multiple different stages of stylus pressure detection. You'd really quite a rather fundamentally different type of touch screen, like in those wacom/cintix etc. drawing pads.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Have pie menus been considered? I like the idea of them for finger/stylus based input, but I've not read any studies of their usability on handheld devices.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Pie menus are somewhat problematic with stylus/finger and a small screen. Because the screen is so small, there are often cases where you can't really display a pie menu to all directions, because you reach the screen edge. And it's really not very good if it sometime would open really somewhere else. At least you lose the benefit of the thing pie menus try to offer in the first place, of learning almost like a gesture to select a certain command. Also, whereas with a mouse cursor you see equally well in all directions, especially fingers block downward directions. Even more, since mouse gives cursor movement and hovering and a touch screen does not, there are a lot of issues with those.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Here's a very simple, yet quite obvious tip (which is probably why nobody at Nokia thought of it): If you have a device that's going to be operated by finger/stylus, PUT THE FREAKIN' MENUS AT THE FUDGIN' BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN!

There really is no need to invent all kinds of weirdness, just a plain observation: Every time a user has to go to the top of the screen with a finger/stylus, (s)he obscures most of the screen.

Again a revolutionary vision of the obvious that sofar only the Newton got right. Hildon is particularly nasty in that respect, because the menus are both at the top and at the left, and frak the user coming and going. Then again, there isn't much that isn't nasty in Hildon...

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

The problem with touhscreen UIs IMO is that, for the most part, they start off on the wrong premise: emulate a traditional PC UI and then work around the stuff that doesn't work the same.

I say it's time to forget that nonsense and design from scratch. Fight legacy UI encroachment as much as possible, by default. Maybe my wild suggestions so far won't work with the hardware in question, but that's still no reason IMO to be bound by an approach that may not be best.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

At the left? isn't that how it should be? Or maybe I'm the only one who flips the menus open with his left thumb, so my right thumb can already be headed toward the spot in the menu...

And below here, perhaps I'm arguing for the sake of argument -- after all, does it matter which way is best for menus to come up? not if it's configurable!

But the apps/email menu does open from the bottom-left, which is good for me. And having the (less-used) tray at the top leaves the bottom open for simple-launcher. The bottom's best even for non-menu items, and I start things from simple-launcher often enough for me to like that.

Still, I think my config, if I set it up, would be a REAL panel (with menus, launchers and large applets on it, and no non-configurable bookmark & contact junk!) across the bottom of the screen, and a system tray on the right edge for small applets that don't need much interaction. Nothing across the top, and (undecided here) either access task switching only through a flyout menu, or stack task icons over the whole left edge.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

I think Karel's point is still valid, though, at least by default. A bottom menu approach for the out-of-the-box experience makes more sense than a top menu approach for tablets.

That said, there may be an approach that trumps anything we suggest here...

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Texrat, one of the greatest strengths of the ITs is that "traditional PC UI" apps can be ported (after a fashion) with very little effort. A radically different UI could seriously reduce the number of apps ported by the community. So unless Nokia can bring some serious development effort to bear on this, they'd be crippling the ITs to do this with no compatibility.

Of course, one thing suggested on the forums was the use of xvnc and vncviewer to run completely unmodified (i.e. just cross-compiled) apps displaying to a separate X server. Something like that could work here, but it's still risky changing things that dramatically.

Still, I agree strongly in principle, and many steps could be made in that direction without causing such problems. But any practical UI redesign has to keep existing unix apps in mind (IMHO).

Edited just to add quote. Thread is getting slightly tangled.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

I don't see why we couldn't have both: A 'small screen, finger optimized' UI (and no that is not Maemo in its current form) , and a regular KDE/Gnome/etc. 'desktop' UI.

The first could be for applications that you would typically use with your fingers, with a limited number of highly polished apps, such as mail, chat, browser, mediaplayer. The latter for easy portability with apps that you would typically use with a stylus and/or external keyboard.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Because KDE and Gnome are bloated hogs.

And because, even with a stylus, enough is different that a good UI that's an easy port will be substantially different on the device. There's things you can do without making people rewrite their apps, and those should be done.
But yes, we could have both (a sane UI for desktop apps on a handheld device, and a dedicated UI for apps specifically targeting this device), and I'd like that.
Just don't ditch the ease of porting entirely, especially not in favor of revision 0 of a brand-new UI.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

- the one thing i wish for is consistency between applications... it is kinda annoying that some apps use Ctrl+Q, while others only offer a 'Close' menu item...

- in this regard, it appears that os2008 has taken a step backward - seems like there was more consistency in os2007 - perhaps this is a 'feature' of the hardware keyboard? (BT keyboard shortcuts are also horked under os2008 - try reassigning an FKey - you CAN'T!!!)

:-(

- but i look forward to more improvements, such as a system-wide copy and paste? i'm sure things will get better... developers have been doing a good job so far...

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

I think the PalmOS UI is a good place to start :D

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

I think Maemo OS is the best place to start.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

The point that article makes is that good design for the small screen/handheld requires lots of usability testing - making sure that the user interacts easily with the system, doesn't struggle/hunt to find things. Don't just design on a big screen and squeeze it in but use a real device too.

My feeling is that the UI for the tablet probably had several authors so wasn't designed as a coherent whole, didn't go through many design interations, and some features were thrown in for good measure. Love it or hate it, OSX is a reasonable example of consistency!

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

+1

(consistency is a feature that Apple has spent many millions on, but which has reaped 100X in rewards)

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

PalmOS mixes top and bottom menus too, but has the saving grace that for most applications the menus only do the lesser-user tasks, 95% of tasks allow everything to be done through the main screen. The older versions of PalmOS were probably better as they were leaner and simpler.

Maemo tries too hard to make everything work all at the same time - menus, buttons, side options etc.

Maemo is the best place to start, because it's actually working and has all the building blocks we need. Firstly, remove elements from the UI that duplicate stuff, add to applications only things which make them all consistent.

Most people get so used to their preferred UI they forget its quirks and flaws. Was it Steve Jobs who once said "don't ask what we can add to make it better, but what can we take away to make it easier"... I would add "without losing useful features".

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

The UI *should* be independent of the app functionality. Apps should not care how they appear.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Again, and ad nauseam, this is what the Newton does right.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

To my mind apps must follow the OS UI steam. Must. There MUST be guidelines for icons, menus and navigation concepts.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

I like the idea behind Android where applications are split up into reusable components like 'show map' or a 'list contacts' so you can do mash-ups of them, instead of first opening your 'contacts' app and then open a different 'map' app.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Having just read Texrat's comment I agree. The older Palm OS apps had an intelligent simplicity to their layouts that worked well for finger use and easy eye format yet still had all options available in menu(or command line) beyond the front form factor.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

+1

that would make sense... but getting IT FOSS developers to agree on such a style guide might be like trying to herd cats?

:-)

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Right now im writing down my thoughts about Maemo UI improvements and I think, I'll group them in in one blog, tagged, kindly illustrated and guided. Anyone wants to participate?)
Once again, I'm talking about improvements of CURRENT UI, and not about making it looks like %iphone/palmos/psion/freebsd/citizen calculator%.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

now that really makes me think of the newton as i have heard it described...

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Aw, I forgot.
And to proove concept thoughts we (me and my great friend-programmer Krum) will show a port of a desktop software called «metromap». And step by step will describe, how it's UI was evolving from desktop oriented to thumbs-friendly mobile UI.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

All the nokia phone 'concept' videos on youtube seem very finger oriented so my guess is that something like that is already under development. This video is a year old already. Another very iphone-like one.

Re: Custom GUI / Shell Replacement for ITTs?
 

Absolutely! But legacy apps (which do care, though they shouldn't) won't be ported in any quantity if rewriting them (to be independent, as they should be) is required.

tehwalrus:
Android is sounding interesting, but I haven't had a chance to try it yet. How's it on finger-friendliness, anyway? If it's decent, it'd be great to have it on the ITs. Leverage a nice broad developer base that way.