You are not forced to do the gestures in top or mid, you can do them in bottom area too Dave

You mean the status bar? Yeah, that would be awesome!

No, you click a button from any screen, swipe a Z on screen and you are calling your contact Zorro, open an app, close all apps or what ever you have pre.configured.

I agree with Dave, that Jolla is currently only half way to the one hand experience.

I disagree about pulley menus - they are very one hand friendly (probably the best solution I have seen in the mobile world). The same with back/forward gesture.

The problem is that there are still lists of items to select, starting from the top of the screen. So when you need to select the first item, you are usually way out of your comfort zone. This usually happens when you open the last received email or any notification from the Events view, for that matter (!).

I cannot imagine how to fix this, though - the only way I see is to be able to pull the list items down so they don't start from the top (like it is done in BB10 menus), but it is impossible due to the presence of pulley menus.
Another way, but also quite complicated would be to introduce few items from the top of the list at its bottom (giving an impression of a infinite list), but it would mean that "push-up" menus would have to be removed.

What would make sense would be encouraging developers to dedicate top ~50% of the screen to non-interactive components (until scrolled), like images, information banners etc. Pretty much how it is done in the Friends application when you are viewing your profile.

EDIT: Now thinking of this ^^ it's not a bad idea. I'll try to implement it in the apps I'm currently developing.

As Bubbless already said, it is possible even on Jolla (even if it is not very comfortable in some situation, with a small chance to drop your phone because of the finger achrobatics required to do that; I blame the phone dimensions, it's that little too big). But even with the current dimensions, you would just need to have a slide input keyboard and voilà! Typing with one and only is not only possible, but really convenient. Oh, how I miss it from N9... when it was enabled in... what was it, PR1.2? It completely changed my experience with the device, so, so comfortable.

Regarding the rest, I strongly disagree with anybody saying Sailfish is not designed with one-handed operation in mind, imho it's totally the opposite. Event view and peek gestures, putting apps in background, accepting/refusing actions, accessing the pulley menu... aside from some small quirks while catching the input desired from the user (especially with the pulley menu) all of these can be easily performed with one hand. The only gesture difficult to perform in one handed operation (and it was so also on the N9) is the swipe-from-top to close an app / lock the device. But again, I blame the dimensions of the phone: on N9 it was a little bit more difficult to perform than the rest, but still doable; on Jolla there's the serious chance to drop the phone while stretching your hand to reach that top spot, and it is also not that comfortable. That's the only gesture I use my left hand for. That, and typing very long messages (a thing I hope can be solved soon with a slide input keyboard, but development on both open source implementations announced for Sailfish seems to be stopped.

EDIT: wait, the issue descibred from nodevel in the post just above mine is also true... and the proposed solution is brilliant! Please, do it!

I've been using my Jolla one handed this whole time, had no idea I was doing it wrong

Either way, if it really was impossible to use one-handed, surely Marc Dillon would have some complaints...

For locking, when I'm too lazy to stretch my hand to the top, I usually just flick down, enter the lock screen and wait a few seconds until the device locks itself.

Just a small follow up on my idea. Here's a very quick example just did in my app:


It is a custom made 'InfoHeader' component that can replace the PageHeader component. As an input, it takes the list model you are showing on the page (supports both ListModel and XmlListModel).

Items are animated -> move into its (random) place and have a random color. The big number is the number of items in the list.

It automatically hides when you switch to landcape.

Of course, this is just a placeholder for lists that have no additional valuable information - in apps like e-mail, there should be some important info about the number of e-mails/senders/etc. . I expected that it could trigger lots of "what a wasted space" comments when I release it, so it will be possible to disable from the settings.

EDIT:
You can get the code here.

IIRC I read on TJC that SailfishOS 2.0 should be actually ready for the phone quite soon, like not this coming update, but at the next iteration (if this time all goes well and they can fix for good the regressions introduced with Qt 5.2 upgrade).

quite soon...if you mean like in 4...6 month.

next update mid late jan, then next one in may/June. Jolla has proven that every month is not possible for them but rather every 3-4 month with new features and some mini security or for show updates in between if we are lucky. I think jolla should change it or rethink their strategy to release every month if they cant. Nothing wrong with that.

Sailfish 2.0


I want to be able to watch vids, sports, movies like in this this gif so hope they fix some support for major services or add flash support

What game is that down left in the tablet? Native?