improper use of hardware keys
 

There are three apps that drive me nuts in terms of the hardware keys. In the
rss reader and the browser, i wish i could set the rocker keys to scroll around the page. jumping to the next link or ui widget is completely useless. And in Acrobat, i can't
believe scrollingt all the way PAST the edge doesn't navigate to the next/previous
page. You mean I have to bring up the context menu or waste screen real estate by
showing the status bar so i can attempt to hit the tiny forward/back buttons? And why
do i have to touch a field with my finger, or press the center select key, to bring up the
thumbboard? Why can't i enable it as the default?
Nokia, you're killin' me.

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

Hold the direction button to scroll the webpage.

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

On the N800 I only could get the directional pad to jump down through the links on a webpage, so smooth scrolling was dependant on where the links in the page are. Can the hardware keys replicate clicking the scroll bar?

Cheers
Rich

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

Not completely useless; there are times when jumping from link to link is exactly what you want. IMO this is implemented more intuitively on both the browser and the RSS reader (by jumping to the next link on the visible part of the page etc) than the use of TAB in a full-size browser.

You can scroll smoothly, in both the browser and the RSS reader by holding down the relevant direction key, rather than just pressing it once. Until I discovered this, I found navigation a bit of a pain too.

Art

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

On my Palm the equivalent 5-way buttons are handled much more intelligently. The "down" key will try to do the Right Thing, which is mostly work as a next-page key but if you start some other line-by-line or link-by-link operation it'll change to that. One page scroll on the scrollbar restores the next-page functionality.
As it is now I use the stylus way more that I want to, and I haven't yet found a way of changing pages in the PDF reader without de-selecting full-screen mode.

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

Hah! I never realized that if you hold the down key it scrolls. However, the scrolling speed is very fast...almost like pressing a Page Down key. I would find it more useful to have the ability to disable "skip to next link/button" and define a number of lines to scroll, like you can do with a mouse wheel.

Navigating from link to link is not useful when reading longer articles in the reader...in the RSS Reader it tends to move from the top of the article to the bottom, skipping everything. It also drive me nuts when I use a combination of screen scrolling and the buttons...the buttons are not aware of my current viewing position, but rather some kind of invisible cursor. So if I scroll a few pages down via a screen drag, read, and then try to use the hardware button to move to the next article, it jumps me BACK several pages. Ack! Plus I'd love to map the center select key to toggle the RSS Channel sidebar. It currently does nothing in that app, and the standard size of those statusbar icons is too small for comfortable finger access.

The most glaring UI omission of them all is the horrific navigation of Acrobat. Not moving to the next page in a PDF automatically while scrolling is profoundly disappointing, and completely kills the usability imho. Every other PDF reader I've used in any platform is smart enough to know to jump to the next page. It's mind boggling how this was left out. Did the developers even TRY to use the app?

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

For the browser, use the search function of this forum to find (numerous) posts about changing the behaviour of hardware keys in Opera.

I'm not Mr Nice Guy today (my neck hurts like hell!), so you're on your own.

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

The key behaviour should really be for the most a part of the OS/UI, we shouldn't have to depend on the applications to get it right. IMO. Obviously it's always possible to do bad stuff in apps, re. where many of them have 800x480 hardcoded (this should instead ideally be handled by a callback that the application should receive when you switch from landscape to portrait - assuming this comes on some later OS release).

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

Keep in mind that this is Linux, where system-wide consistency is considered a Bad Thing <TM>.

(I'm only half joking: I like the configurability philosophy of Linux, and in the end you can't have both consistency and configurability: one of them has to give)

Re: improper use of hardware keys
 

True, but you CAN have consistent baseline behavior with the ability to easily custom configure. ;)