Thread: Ipod touch owner on the fence
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kanishou is offline kanishou
2009-05-02 , 12:33
Posts: 341 | Thanked: 607 times | Joined on Dec 2008
#44
Originally Posted by attila77 View Post
- There is no such thing as useless animation. Unfortunately, users I had feedback from seemed to want/like it to whizz woosh and wazoom, even if you just picked an option or pressed a button. Canola is a good example, but fremantle in general also employs large amounts of animation 'for the fun of it'.
What would be an example of such large amounts of animation "for the fun of it"? Most animations used in GUI design fall into the category of transitions. Transitions generally help the eye to follow what's going on and make interfaces more pleasant to use (which is what usability is all about). Transitions can be more elaborate than they have to, which is often done purely for effect. But I doubt you will find much of this in Fremantle.


- I played with 'blind' kinetic scrolls in pyqtoreader. It's not that hard. It's pretty much equivalent to pressing a couple of keys in advance (like with cursors or pgup/pgdn while the screen has not refreshed yet). The biggest impediment there is that it's simply not cool. It works (especially as a page flip button replacement), but it's too raw.
It may not be hard for you, but blind mouse gestures are already a bit hard to discover. Making the amount of scrolling dependend on how fast you execute the gesture without any visual feedback... that's intense. Of course if you are designing for geeks, that can certainly be described as "not that hard".


maemo 4.x default scrollbars are microscopic and hard to use, agreed, thus making almost ANY scroll solution appear less strenuous
Of course large scrollbars help the issue. Content panning scores points here by offering an even larger drag target, while reserving the largest amount of space for content.

I might be 'misnaming' drag zoom. A tap or mouse gesture shows the page fit to the screen (with the current viewpoer marked), and dragging the zoomed box positions (scrolls) to the specified point on release.
That's a good one, but would you want this as a universal replacement for kinetic panning? It's a two-step process, which is much less efficient if you just want to slightly adjust the view. And it's usefullness depends on the size of the content. If the content is only slightly larger than the view, or infinitely large, then it's not so effective.

Kinetic panning makes for a good standard, which can certainly be augmented with more specialized forms of scrolling if the type of content allows it.