Thank you all for the original HIG and the crowdsourced editing of the Maemo 5 Maemo 5 Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).

(Instead of hijacking the old HIG-Proofread thread, I chose to create a new thread so that we have a slightly more visible place to discuss the document than the wiki talk).

I have some questions/inputs concerning the HIG. The first two are general, about the document itself:

• The original non-proofread document is still online (and also comes up as an earlier hit in Google than the proofread HIG document in our wiki). Can somebody take the original offline and/or link to the wiki article instead?
• Now that the N900 is official, could somebody with such a device (ideally someone from the Nokia UI group) add screenshots from some core applications to illustrate core concepts of the article?

The third input is about the the concept of "fullscreen without a hardware button", which is not really explained in the HIG. In the N900 videos, only the browser (and the game :-) seem to have a Fullscreen mode. The N900 doesn't have a hardware button like the N800/N810 used to have.
In the N900 browser, there is a fullscreen-button in the bottom right corner which activates fullscreen mode. It is however unclear to me:

• if this button and position is the official way how every app should do the switching?
• how does one return to non-fullscreen mode?

Thanks
-Tom

Thanks for pointing this out. I removed the old HIG and replaced it with a pointer to the wiki page. It will take sometime before it is reflected on the server.

It is not the official way for every app: "The use of regular toolbars in a Hildon application should be avoided. "
(http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...trols#Toolbars)

There are three methods of fullscreen handling on the device right now:

The browser has a toggle button in the lower right, which removes all toolbars. When the screen is touched, a transparent button is placed on top of the lower right corner, which can be used to exit fullscreen. This presumably involves some wizardry and is probably not recommended as a standard way.

Other applications have a toggle button on the toolbar in the lower right, which only removes the titlebars. The toolbar always stays on screen, so you can toggle back to normal mode.

Games and similar applications always run in fullscreen and don't have a way to exit fullscreen mode. However, they should provide a close button in the upper right corner, so that the user knows how to get out of it again. Bonus points for a way to access the task switcher in the upper left corner. Bounce does both very well, whenever you touch the screen it pauses the game and displays the controls. Camera and Media Player only have back buttons in the upper right corner in fullscreen modes, which gets you back to the non-fullscreen part of the application.

I'll certainly try that in my software. So the way to do this seems to add my own button to the GUI of my app (using the appropriate Nokia system icon) and then call the D-Bus session bus interface com.nokia.hildon_desktop using the signal name: exit_app_view (according to a post on the developer mailing list by Nokia's Kimmo Hämäläinen).

PS: He also mentioned "We will also have a HW key shortcut (ctrl+backspace) for that". Is that implemented in the N900?

Yes, that works (and can be seen in one of the videos as well).

Can someone move this thread to Development, please? Thanks!

fyi we are working on the publication of the Hildon UI specifications. I mean the very same specs the Maemo team has been using to develop Maemo 5, with a couple of revisions and tweaks to bring the document to the public.

Planned to go out at some point before the Summit.

Moved.

Tim