Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I think rainisto teased about it already on TMO. What I understood is that the antenna currently on the devce is small and can only detect inner NFC chips embedded in Ambiance Other Halves, but I may be wrong. I asked for details to clarify and make sure I got it right, but got no answer. I was very disappointed that they did not manage to put proper NFC in the main half.

The other half concept is great, but you can't count on it for basic hardware features like if people were going to go out with their phone and 3-4 OH. NFC is basic stuff, and now if I want a good HWKB OH, it needs to include NFC as well, not to mention FM radio. :/ I can't imagine having to drop NFC to have radio (and then not being able to pair my BT headphones easily), or having to drop NFC to have a keyboard. Droping the keyboard for weather sensors would be OK, as well as droping an Angry Birds OH for an extralarge battery OH. But NFC in 2013-2014 is something different, it's like discarding gyroscope from the main half and putting it in an OH.

Fortunately enough, no OH is out yet, so I don't have to chose anyway.

I can understand the lack of FM radio given that it is not used by a large proportion of users (yet very important to those that find a use in it), but NFC antenna too tiny for working with something else than OH? :/ Hope I got it wrong, which is totally possible. Sorry in advance, if so.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Oh dear disappointing first call with the phone - it powered down half way through for no obvious reason:-(

Seems fine on reboot though, will wait and see

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Sure it powered down? Proximity sensor will turn off display to save power during call.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

powered down as in ended call, totally unresponsive, woke up when I pressed the power button

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

someone posted a dmesg that showed 28 partitions(!). Anything weird on the filesystems? Lots of Android stuff?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Ok next stupid question. How do i get the .rpm onto the phone. Loaded several android apps via dropbox but the phone tells me "please download an app that can open this file". Similarly I can't get a file attachment to open (though that was an opml file)

I can do terminal, but easier not to - my eyesight is only OK at best so its quite hard work!

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Please get in touch with care@jolla.com if this happens again.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Ok will do. Hope it doesn't!

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Have you loaded the android compatability app from the Jolla store?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

yes, sorry maybe not clear. I can download .apk from dropbox and the phone installs them no problem

However getting the .rpm files onto the phone that way doesn't work. I want to get as many sailfish apps on there instead of android as possible, so that's quite important

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I thought the more complex stuf was going to be covered by teh I2C chip and not NFC. It worries me that NFC restrictions may be hardware related, I can wait for sotware and firmware updates but if the device is physically crippled and can't do full NFC or I2C that is a different issue.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

agree about NFC. especially since my phone virtually never detects a change of other half

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

+1 re NFC, it is really nice to pair with the speakers with that. Then again, that is my only use case, and I know nobody that actually uses it for anything. My mates discovered NFC thanks to my speakers. In fact, the Nexus 5 is rubbish at it in comparison with older phones. Perhaps it isn't a popular feature, same case with MMS that affects a small fraction of people.

I still can't wait to play with the phone :-)

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Thanks for answer! Would be great if you also could post some screenshots.
Thanks

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I think I read somewhere (probably here on TMO) that the volume rockers are both useable as a hardware camera button? For me, that's good enough... not quite a hardware camera button... but definitely a huge step up from having to fumble around for an on screen button.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Yes, instructions in jolla.com/guide for that.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I have the same thoughts. I'm completely fine with features missing in software, as they can be easily added in the future, but those hardware cuts are are quite dissapointment. I mean, if it's just a case of a bigger antenna. Also, I'm using a FM radio sometimes and I don't understand why it's not present in the phone, although it seems that FM radio is already a part of the used SoC (it's only software/driver issue like in N900 or some hardware part is missing?).
I like the Other Half concept, but not everything can be added by that, surely not everything at once in one "the best" OH. And I don't want to carry bunch of other halves with me for several tasks I might want to do with my phone.
But, I still can't wait for my Jolla to arrive and I'm happy that I've helped Jolla to grow, hoping those issues will sort out in the future, at least with Jolla 2 phone ;-)

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Re other half, I'm really hoping Jolla is reading this and getting it for feedback, or anybody for that matter. The Jolla is 9.9mm thick, what can an other half that makes it 15mm thick provide? Maybe NFC, FM radio, keyboard, some extra juice. You never know. What about 20mm thick in total?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Absolutely, that is not what I meant. Of course if a HW KB OH is made, it'll likely use i2c. What I meant is that NFC is useful (sometimes), and if it only comes with OH, then we'll have to drop it if we prefer using another OH. NFC is definitely not my priority over HW KB or FM radio, but I think it's a shame if it is not fully integrated in the main half, because that means we won't have it except if nothing better than a NFC OH comes out.

It was already hard to believe in the release of a HW KB someday, then believing in a HW KB with FM radio included became insane, and now adding NFC in that precious OH is beyond insane. I don't like the idea that I'll have to chose between OH exclusive features and features that are already default in most 2013-2014 phones. The idea with OH was "additional" features in my thinking, not substitutes.

Eagerly looking forward to playing with the Jolla anyway. Don't conclude that I am trolling or raging because I criticize this, I just feel it deserves to be clarified, or criticized if it is actually what NFC on the Jolla will be.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

exFAT filesystem is not supported currently, I think. All 64 GB SDXC-memory cards are preformatted to have exFAT. Reformatting them to ext4 in some Linux PC may work. Later, exFAT-support could come to jPhone also.

I'd say you are wrong. Android has good multitasking. In specific ways it is better and more clever than the normal UNIX multitasking. Activities, processes which interact with a user, are not suppose to run when process is not on the foreground, there is no reason to waste battery life then.
If a process needs some code to run in the background, a Service or IntentService is created.

I use multitasking in Android daily, successfully.

Recent high end Android devices with bigger screens, like Samsung Note 3 and Note 10.1 have multiwindow multitasking, when many applications run in the foreground and they all can interact with a user at the same time.

There were some discussion about Android's process life-cycle's (see picture) Pause-state. Pause-state is when the Activity is no longer in the foreground, but may be partly visible still (or not). The Activity's process may run in the background also in the Pause-state (Android 3.x and later) and only when going to Stop-state, it needs quickly to save all needed session data, if nice user-friendly Resume is needed. On the Stop-state, the Android system may kill the Activity in low memory conditions or for some other reasons.

I'd hope, also native apps for Jolla, would have trapped SIGHUP and SIGINT signals and behave like Android apps when they go to Stopped-state. So if kernel needs to OOM-kill the process, it would have session data saved to persistent memory and when a user restarts the app, it returns to the same state it was before the OOM-kill. That is one lesson which would be good to learn from the Android system for all (mobile) apps.

But also many (lazy) Android-developers do not just care if their app go to Stopped-state. They just assume a user would always run their app in the foreground and then quit it when a user is done with it. It then gets frustrating if a user goes back to the app and expects it to be in the same state where (s)he left it.

If you mean a rpm-file which you have locally on the filesystem or on a sd-card? With zypper:
http://remind-nix.blogspot.fi/2008/0...kages-for.html
http://forums.opensuse.org/english/g...le-zypper.html
I do not know if zypper is found in Jolla as a CLI program.

With a rpm-program:
rpm --install /tmp/coolnewsoftware.armv7hl.rpm

Btw, are native app and software rpm-files signed with a GPG-key to prevent MITM-attacks?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

They needed to be listening looong before now...

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

"Extension interfaces for wireless NFC" from https://jolla.com/ "Specifications".

What it means?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

There have been a lot of discussions on TMO about Android's "multitasking". I don't think you can open a terminal, type for i in `cat sites.txt`; do wget $i; done, go away and expect the wget to constantly run until all your URL's in sites.txt are retrieved.

That is quite a crude example, but it's what a real multitasking OS is about. I really hope Jolla doesn't go the Android way. I don't know how Linus even accepted Google's broken approach to multitasking in the kernel. Sailfish already provides the ability to inform the process whether it's in the foreground or not (like a lot of windows managers in Linux, for what it's worth), so as a programmer one should react accordingly.

If an application is rubbish at behaving in a mobile environment, then it shouldn't be used, don't worry, the users will figure that out sooner or later and another one will surpass it. The OS shouldn't be designed taking into consideration programmers's laziness, IMNSHO, or we'll end up with Windows again. Hell, Android is the Windows of the mobile world - it requires the biggest HW, it consumes most of the battery, you name it.

I do appreciate that battery life is very limited in the mobile world lately, but that is changing and will dramaticlaly improve over the years. What will Google do then? How will they go back to the traditional preemptive multitasking? Will they rewrite all the applications and services themselves?

There are already a few folks in this thread that will be missing the ability of the browser to load several pages concurrently, like the N9 does, in the Sailfish browser. Yes, it uses more battery, but it's beautiful, and it's something that the likes of iOS cannot do, and I can't speak for Android there as I haven't tried their latest browser (pre-Chrome ones couldn't pull that off either). The mobile user shoudn't be patronised either, so let them choose whether to run multiple applications at the same time or not.

I apolgise if I sound angry, but I do feel very strongly against crippled multitasking as I do use my phone as such and as a computer, so I don't like Apple's and Google's approach to what they call multitasking.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Just don't use Android ;) Can one actually purge all Android related packages from Sailfish without breaking anything?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

i have a question about the pulley menu. if im scrolling through a list e.g. emails and want to use the pulley menu, do i have to go all the way back up again or is there another way?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I understand that you actually have to install the ACL, so presumably you can use Sailfish without Android - that will be my first test anyway, the minute I get my phone. Well, not really, if I get it before xmas, it will go under the tree and I'll just have to wait a bit longer.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

That's a good question, and I think it actually originated with the browser. But look at the videos: the browser doesn't have a pulley menu, nor I think the email client does. This is a UX challenge :-)

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Talking about alarms, is an alarm be able to bring up the notification if it triggers when the phone is off?

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Its not a simple thing to add an RFiD antenna. Needs some engineering work.

However I am also a bit dissapointed about that. I really hoped for it :(

It seems HW related I asked about NFC API on the mailing list:

https://lists.sailfishos.org/piperma...er/001539.html

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Fuse is supported and you can compile exfat support with developer mode. Its not included in firmware because of lisencing issues. But I've tested that exfat 64GB card works in Jolla phone when using self compiled exfat support. And ofrcourse you can use ext4 too.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

You have to scroll back to top, unfortunately. It would have been nice if you could for instance long press and pull down for it. Currently long press opens up a small menu below the selected email, with options Move to, Mark as unread and Delete. In the top pulley menu the options are Sort by, Select emails, Update and New email.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Yes, one can even decide not to install Android support in the first place. It does not come preinstalled on the phone, but is available separately from the Jolla Store.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Lets not go to too deep in this OT, but the terminal window program's backend could (should) be programmed to be Service and IntentService and it could do just that what you describe. Terminal's GUI would be a normal Activity which connects to that backend which is running CLI processes and bash. The GUI part could be killed in between when a user leaves it (the terminal window) to the background. Like I wrote, all code wanted to be run in the background should not be an Activity but a Service. It is easy for a programmer to know in advance, but hard for the OS to guess which code is wanted to run in the background no matter what. And it wastes battery life if we assume just all code to be equal in this sense.

Android seems to have done it right, because so many "normal users", like my mom, grandma can use Android-phones and Android-apps, even something like Samsung Mini (384 MB RAM). 80% market share (and necessity Jolla to support Android apps) would had not come if it just wouldn't work. Also Android's Java just seems to work good as a developing language and platform. It guides even bad app developers to make somewhat working apps which won't bring the whole system to its knees even if behaving badly.

About future of Jolla's Android app-support. I think it would be good if in the future the Android apps which are in the Pause- or Stop-state, not yet killed but resident in the RAM, would show in the Sailfish's task manager as separate apps. There could be a setting for ACL, whether user wants to show just one ACL subwindow in the task manager like it is now, or all Android apps which are still in the RAM-memory (Running, Paused, Stopped) or the latest run N Android apps (like the default task manager in Android shows them). Especially if Sailfish is ported and sold later to endusers with hardware like Note 3, which has 3 GB RAM, a user can then easily run several Android and native JollaOS apps and quickly switch between them through the task manager.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

No they don't, but some 95% works.

I was able to buy music and play it today, but when I tried to install Google Play Music (player), GooglePlay crashed, and it kept crashing after a reboot too. I had to clear up /data/dalvik-cache and reinstall/relink (ln -s) phonesky.apk to /data/app to get it working again. Possibly clearing up just com.android.vending under it might have been enough.

I probably mentioned somewhere that Chrome installs and its menus work, but it does not render canvas. I would have been nice to see that working...

Google Maps is working, but GPS and location services are not. Nor do we have regular android location Settings to configure them (there are Google settings, but that is not enough).

Besides of that there has not been many problems. Occasional GooglePlay crash that haven't caused any further problems. I can buy stuff, and non Google applications have all worked fine. (Youtube is ok too.)

Note: you don't have to install everything in tutorial on this page:
http://jollafin.blogspot.fi/2013/11/...for-jolla.html

Phonesky.apk (GooglePlay store) is already under the signed package that gets copied in the rsync of system directory, and Google Play Service is not absolute necessity unless you wish to update store (I think). So you should need only the signed package contents to get GooglePlay store working:
http://goo.im/gapps/gapps-jb-20121011-signed.zip

Basically the installation of any regular android apps seems to be a process of copying apk file under /data/app. This makes them to pop up in Jolla app menu too.

With Google Apps that get installed under /opt/alien/system/app, you may have to create symbolic links (ln -s) from /opt/alien/system/app to /data/app. Or plain install Phonesky.apk as I did the first time. Note that you don't have to install all of the apps, and Phonesky (and reboot after that) was enough for me.
I later did links for the rest just in case, but it didn't seem to have much effect in results.

After all these however, you may get errors about google voice search, for instance. You can get rid of these by simple unlinking/deleting GoogleEars.apk from the /data/app, and also just in case from /opt/alien/system/app directories, and rebooting.

The guide uses command
'rsync -av --ignore-existing /home/nemo/dir_that_has_gapps/system /opt/alien'
for initial installation of the gapps on the device.

(Remember the backup before doing that with
'cp -r /opt/alien/system /opt/alien/system_bak')

It is wise to do this copying of whole Gapps system directory for now. Cherry picking can be done later when all the Gapps pieces required for basic functionality can be confirmed. It is likely that for just GooglePlay store functionality not all of those are important. But for some other apps, using login stuff or editing your calendar through your account, would not work with just google framework apk and store installed.

This is still quite a lot of fumbling in the dark, but we really do have a (well enough) working GooglePlay in our hands.

EDIT: Made it a bit clearer whether rsync of the whole system directory from the signed package is necessary or not.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

UX on SailfishOS Questions
Can any of you with the Jolla explain how these process went (actions versus your expectations)
- receive contact information in an email, initiate a phone call from the info in the email
- [same scenario] copy information into the calendar for upcoming meeting, send meeting request to person(s) on that email, update appointment
- connect to another accessory using Bluetooth, WiFi/DNLA, or NFC/Bluetooth - what worked, what didn't, how long did it take you from deciding to transfer something to it being on the other device
- while on a call, quickly disconnect, then get back on the line with the person (how did the device respond to the switch in/out of the telephone app/service, how did the network seem to respond)
- how long does it take to put device into a silent state when an alarm/ringer is going off, and the device isn't in your hand - what steps did you do to quench the sounds

These are mostly normal UX questions, and things not always covered in reviews. But, in terms of evaluating the UX against and with other platforms, these are the kinds of questions which make a lot of sense to ask. Have at it.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

I tested it and Jolla started booting when the time came but during the boot it went back down without actually playing the alarm. Seems like a bug.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Typical on Qualcomm HW. We removed a few and merged them into a giant 'sailfish' btrfs with subvolumes.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Anyone get the flickr android app to work? won't allow me to log in, though yahoo mail does

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Alarm: About three seconds. Touching the screen with a finger and then either pushing up (dismiss) or pulling down (snooze) and then releasing.

Re: Jolla User Experience Thread
 

Does the jPhone ship with a frog sound for SMS notification?