Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

You seem to miss the point that the n8x0 did the context menu the "maemo 5" way, without it getting in the way of working in the long press, lift finger/stylus manner as well. So you wouldn't even need a switch to choose, it worked in either manner perfectly fine, this why we who actually used a good UI on the old NIT, know that this UI is objectively inferior.

Also in Microb, the context menu will not stay open if you keep your stylus in the menu frame, but not selecting anything, that seems to only work in file manager and some other apps, though this is pretty much impossible to use with finger, and difficult at best with stylus.

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

I completely agree. A relatively important and sensitive mode, as in desktop editing, should not be activated so easily by accident...it is too shallow in terms of depth of access. My desktop sporadically changes its content just due to unintentional touch of the screen which is exposed to touch all the time.

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

Nokia probably hired too many HCI people to design everything else but N900 UI. Let's see some faces but don't spit on it http://maemointeraction.wordpress.com/about/

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

@mentalist
Problem comes down to this:
popup-menu closes if you touch screen outside of popup frame. Depending on where menu jumps up for me it tends to sometimes close itself when i start moving my finger. Quite likely I'm not the only one and I have adapted my usage behaviour to N900. If something works 95% of time then to end user it means that it's not usable.

Actually it seems that it works differently in main conversations view(menu closes if you move finger outside of box) and in conversations message view(works as it should imo).Hmmmm.Can someone confirm this?

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

I've actually sometimes seen it work so that if I lift my finger after the context menu appears, the context menu stays on screen until I either tap outside it or select an item in the menu. Until now, I've considered it a desireable bug, but now that I think of it this differing behaviour might be exclusive to some applications?
I'll see if I can muster forth the effort and time to try it in a few different applications...

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

The problem is not the choice of UI paradigm, (both release-to-select and tap-twice) are valid. The problem is the stupidity of having a menu pop up directly underneath the touch input that triggered it, therefore having it obstructed by said touch input.

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

I can confirm the context menu does close when you drag away in Conversations main window while staying on when you do it in most other programs.

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

It's funny to see that someone was mature enough to kindly tag this thread with the following: "bada rox, if u r too dumb, to use maemo"
Kids these days...

I tried the context menu behaviour quickly in File Manager, Conversations, fMMS, MicroB and Calendar. When you long-tap something and the menu appears, there are three alternatives:
1) if you release the "pointer" while it is on a menu item (highlighting it), the item gets selected.
2) if you drag the pointer outside the context menu and release it, the context menu disappears.
3) if you position and release the pointer on the very thin border of the context menu, without highlighting any of the items, the context menu will remain on the screen until you either select an item on the menu or tap outside it.

In all except MicroB, option 3) worked every time I tried it, but it does indeed take some accuracy to lift off the finger/stylus without moving the "pointer" from the thin menu border. I wonder how this behaviour could be tweaked?

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

Never worked for me this way.

Re: How stupid can UI design get?
 

As I never had a problem with that "context menu", so I just fired up the phone app and tested this out. Yes, it is good!
First post seems simply wrong to me. Or inaccurate.

For me, when I shortly press on a name, it simply offers me to call her back.
When I long-press on that name, I get a pop-up menu, but that is offset slightly, so I *do not* select anything if simply lifting my fingernail. But if I want to select the first entry of that menu, I have to move a bit to the right, or for another entry, I have to move down.

Quite okay I think, and I am wondering why it behaves for me like it should and behaves like complained by OP with selecting on itself?

(I am on a fully updated Maemo 5, PR1.3)