Thread: Help support Automatic Screen Rotation (Univeral Portrait support) for the N900
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Thor is offline Thor
2009-09-26 , 13:00
Posts: 488 | Thanked: 107 times | Joined on Sep 2009 @ Asgard / Midgard / London
#43
I like some of your ideas.

-The biggest problem here really is the desktop. The multitasking screen should be pretty straight forward as they are all windows of a fixed size. Just rotate and re-locate and that's done.

-Most applications will probably have to have a landscape and/or portrait UI. Is this how it is designed in the iPhone and Android phones? I'm not sure how the n97 one works as I don't have one, but I remember the home screen on my N82 does not rotate from portrait mode.

-we can have a separate landscape and portrait homescreens/desktops but this would get confusing in everyday use if they all have different widgets/icons on them, essentially giving 8 homescreens.

-One way to autorotate the desktop is to leave the resizing and require scrolling to get to the other side. This could apply in any application if autorotation is a requirement, but will leave "widescreen bars" at the top and bottom in portrait mode.

-Another way would be to allow resizing of widgets (probably manually by the user?) not just width but height as well, with word wrapped text, if it is updated dynamically. This will require vertical scrolling, but I think would be a great solution while keeping dynamic content.

-Another way would be to translate the landscape desktop to portrait mode using icons instead of dynamic widgets with a few excepts. I would think the likes of twitter, messenger IM, SMS, email icons would be similar to the blackberry. For example, when a new message arrives, put a star on the corner of the icon. It's very noticeable. Also, the number of unread messages can be listed next to it, such as 5 for 5 unread emails/IMs etc. This will end up with a bit more of an iPhone/Blackberry look, but will allow all icons to be on the portrait mode screen with no scrolling required. It would also assign a specific icon size and act as shortcuts to the main program. If you must see the dynamic content, tough, you will just have to access the program, or rotate to landscape mode. I think that could work.

Any thoughts?

Originally Posted by nymajoak View Post
Regarding homescreen and widgets:
The problem is with the free positioning of the widgets if I understand correctly. On rotation they might collide/overlap or end up partly outside the screen. I don't think we want to get rid of the free positioning or have resizing widgets.

The location of the widgets are somehow stored by the OS. Could it be a start to have two separate location storages, one for portrait and one for landscape? After adding a widget and rotating the screen the first time, the user can move the new widget to suit also the other orientation.

This would mean the user has to configure the homescreen for both orientations and might be a bit annoying if a lot of widgets are added in one go, but at least when adding only one I don't think this would bug me as a user too much.

Cons, from the top of my head:
* Width of widgets would be limited to 480 pixels, minus whatever padding is needed.
* Any animations on rotation would need some thought (the widgets wouldn't only rotate but also translate/move). Should be able to look fluid but at what computational cost I don't know.

An extension (not replacing the possibility for manual repositioning) might be to attempt some sort of semi-intelligent auto-repositioning of the widgets by the software. Probably a mess to get working well and the gain (getting a "good suggestion for positions in the other orientation") is probably not great. Note that this would not need to be triggered on every rotation, only when changes to the homescreen had been made.


Well, I tried.
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