Hi Slip : (thanks for the suggestion )

I will try to explain the whys and answer some of the points =)

1. Actually you can always hit "back" on any submenu to go to first part.
2. You also can hit home (in the hardware menu - the menu button does this work)
3. you can also hold the back button (hardware or software)

***the only problem that appears here is that in the N810 nokia placed the menu button on the keyboard ( ) and I really don't wanna mess with the maemo home button. So I really don't know what to do with it.

And I need to agree not only with you but with something clear : a home button is something global, and should be hardware. why? imagine you.. needing to reserve a good space ( touchable, easy, and with no danger around) to home in EVERY screen.
yes, we did that and it sucket a lot on first one. Thats why there's no visible home.


About the "arrow mode back" It's actually just a short cut, if you by mistake touched the wrong ball (it will be side ways) you can just touch the correct one without needing to touch back. So we do not intend to make people actually cross the whole interface using it. it's more like
"spreading wings" menu but still gives you access to the neighborhood items =)

If this becomes a failure : / we can remove it with no problem


how the whole thing works :

We wanted flexibility, if not for canola for the menu component it self. So theres 1 menu with 2 levels righ? The main menu and sub menu.

The main menu can scale up to 12 items. the inner menu can scale up to 10 items. This would give us a whooping 120 item ready menu. WE ARE NOT GOING TO USE IT. but this flexibility is really nice to have (if we need to reuse the component in any other of all our projects)

So, the ideas is to have like page with sub pages, and you just need to hit back if you don't want that.

You approach, yes great indeed but will not scale too much for more items, and worst if you reduce to anything smaller than 50px square is already a error magneto. We want precision in most of the screens, so after a lot of testing we found the best relation between size x successful hits.

So take a look in the seconf video to see a 12 icon screen =) but

as you said :

This is exactly the point : you can go home, and then choose a category (main menu) and your application. We could have killed the second level menu and placed list but we felt that the 2 level could be better this time, and provide a cleaner entry point.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not =) but you will be able to use it and make your decision! I hope you like it, and I can guarantee : we did so much menus this time... =) but we really don't want to collide with any screen now and in the future, so this approach seems nowadays quite nice for our problems.

I will try to find some of the sketches of the menus like you said (I think the dock version we did) but not the "Parting RED sea" good naming on that =)

Thanks for the suggestion, I think we are really happy to see you guys contributing before the thing comes out (actually it was almost made on top of feedback).

BR