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UI discussions
Okay, sampieter's been beating me up over the UI lately, so I need some general consensus/answers here guys. Let me break it down point by point
[*] The interface needs to be finger friendly.[*] The whole point of the app is to make the clock display as large and obvious as possible. [*] The interface needs to be as intuitive and easy to understand/learn for users.

So keeping those points in mind, here's what sampieter recommended:
Do we have a consensus on this? The seconds bar is handy and has some fun potential, but it does take up screen space... so is it worth keeping, or should I ditch it? It can be turned on/off by the user, and it can be used differently in different themes... but for the default "flip" theme should I get rid of it?

I agree that screen real estate is rightly right, especially designing for large finger interaction... but let me put it this way: how many other apps on the tablet REQUIRE you to use a hardware button to exit them?
The power key is associated with powering the device/offline mode/etc; over riding this is dangerous for users. Am I wrong here guys? thoughts?

Not going anywhere.

Now then, in terms of the actual interface... The idea of moving the clock settings button to the alarms screen is interesting, but the more I think about it, the less it makes sense from a logic/flow point of view. The settings screen applies to the clock in general, not anything to do with the alarms. If anything I'd be tempted to go the other way, and make the alarms button appear on the settings screen. However the beauty of Flip is that it makes alarms so EASY, and I think making the alarms settings hard to find/get to would detract from that a LOT.

Now, suggestions for another "top menu bar"... personally I think the clock display is too cluttered already. I don't want to take away from that primary purpose of "BIG CLOCK" any more than already have, and an extra menu bar would be counter productive in my mind. Personally the "setup" and "Alarms" buttons are just big enough to be finger-oriented in my mind, especially since there's nothing else around them, but I'm definitely not as happy with them as with the rest. I also feel they do kind of intrude and look out of place. BUT, without them there, there were complaints that the app wasn't intuitive and self explanatory...

Aggg okay just had to get that out there... the buttons will be going away again, the interface will be changing slightly, and sampieter, I think you need to come up with a nice mockup/theme so we can have 4 themes ready at release time ;-) (And show me how this whole design thing should be done! ;-) ). Make 3 screens with whatever info/buttons/etc you want whereever you want, post it up, and I'll help you make it into a theme!

Thanks!

I prefer having a screen just for alarms. Of any of settings, alarms is something that would be changed most often by the user, and therefore should be as big and as finger friendly as possible.

I also like the seconds bar. Since sometimes some of my .mp3 files don't play, if I'm testing them I know how much time I have to expect the alarm to go off.

1. I like the seconds bar.

2. Remove the "setup" and "alarms" at the top of the screen (they are not finger friendly).

3. Use the "alarm set" display at the bottom to also be the new finger friendly alarm set.

4. Add "setup" text vertically on the right of the date window, and let this be the friendly "setup" button.

5. Change the "next theme" button to "Night Mode". In the setup screen you can choose a "day" and a "night" theme.

6. Make that "night mode" and "exit" buttons bigger and of equal size. Now you have four finger friendly buttons on the bottom of screen.

Seconds bar doesn't bother me one way or the other.

On the main clock screen, have a settings button and an exit button.
The settings button would have options to change the current theme (day/night), button to reach the themes settings page, and a button to reach the alarms settings page.

This keeps the main screen nice and uncluttered more like a traditional clock.

For the advanced user, maintain the finger swipe as quick access to the alarm page and the setting page. Add a new swipe from left to right or right to left to quickly change themes.

First, my alarm woes.... (UI discussion in later message)

I uninstallled Flipclock.
No installing via Application manager, as it still shows 0.9.3 version; I re-installed via the forum link on page 13 of this thread.

the first screen shows the Flipclock main screen. Notice that there's no alarm:



...going to the alarm setting screen, setting up an alarm just a few minutes in advanced:



...look how the alarm setting on the main screen now shows an alarm for 00:27 at night:



...while my clock mode is set to 24-hours:



...let's go to XTerminal, and type:
sudo gainroot flipAlarmSync clear clear clear
Perhaps that will help me with this alarm setting blues?


"OMG" a funky error about an apparent incorrectly set up D-Bus library ... I am now officially freaked.

Next stop: chatting up the nice people of #maemo at irc.freenode.net?

By the way, Nelson L. Squeeko wrote
which looks like my original problem that my alarms did not go of. I thought the problem was with flipclock, but as Nelson suggests it might be the mp3 itself? Oh well. First I have to get this 12/24-hour thingie sorted.

Will keep you posted...

1. Keep the seconds Bar - its cool and it doesnt take too much away from screen real-estate

2. Take away the text "Setup" and "Alarms" from the top corners - it goes against the visual flow of the application.

3. You could make the arrow on top and bootom more prominent to make user realise you got to slide up or down to reach the Alarms and settings screens maybe.

4). Keep both screens seperate - Alarms and Settings with the main clock page in middle as the functioning page

5) Oh, exit button - a must - newbies WILL absolutely trip up on not seeing any exit - since not many realize to use the hardware buttons to exit (even I wouldn't have).

6_ As someone else suggested make the mode button say Night Mode and Day mode ...

7) on Night mode, the day mode (or change mode) button still doesnt show - so no way to understand you can change mode on that invisible button area.

Great app so far ...

Aha! Nice Idea of that Left and right swipe ... !

I am writing a longer UI entry, but just a quicky for this one:

Firstly, I feel that the Nokia N series is owned by "powerusers", who are more apt to tinker with their devices. Or is that too much of a generalization?

Secondly, something I noticed just yesterday: I use the fullscreen/normalscreen hardware button a lot when I'm fooling around with Flipclock (mainly because I noticed that the screen brightness in Insomniac Mode was much brighter than the minimum screen brightness setting of the 'Advanced backlight' program, but I wanted to point that out in a seperate entry altogether).
Since we are in 0.9.x beta release, FlipClock does not hang or freak out when you use the fullscreen/normalscreen button. This brought me to the following: you can use this button to bring FlipClock to a 'normal' screen setting, wherein you can see the 'normal' X exit button (at the top left of the screen).
If you know how to properly use the fullscreen/normalscreen button in order to use a program in fullscreen mode, you can also figure out that flipclock, which opens in fullscreen automatically, can be brought to a smaller version so you can find the X for exit.

My (new) suggestion is to remove the exit button on the screen and use the fullscreen/normalscreen hardware button in order to get to the X exit button.
You'll actually get an extra 'feature' when using this approach, because you can also minimize FlipClock if you want to use another program altogether. So instead of exiting the program everytime you want to do something else, you just minimize it.

Sounds like dbus session has gotten goofed up. Try just restarting the tablet, that will probably take care of it. Also the command should be flipalarmSync, I'm not quite sure how it did anything with the capital A but...

I'll check the 12/24 hour alarm timing problem now to make sure, I thought I'd fixed that before but I'll double check it now.

I'll respond to other things in a bit, just wanted to get that out there quick for you!

I like the idea of having the alarm info box at the bottom always visible and being the button for the alarm settings. Make the date info box be the button for setup. Put a small vertical SETUP on it. Make the swipes still work, but make it a circular pattern. From the clock screen, swipe up to get to alarm settings, swipe up again to general settings, up again for clock. Same but in reverse for swiping down. That way, you could add a fourth screen in the future if you ever need to.

Loving this app, even though i over slept this morning because of it. I forgot to select AM on the alarm setting screen. Maybe have it default to AM and you have to verify (with stylus) that you really do want PM. Maybe a user option for the new screen?

Jim

:edited to make sense.