I don't see why it should be complicated.

The options are...

Q) Do you want a status bar or peeking?

Q) What panel is shown or action taken from each edge swipe?

Q) Do you want 'in panel' swipes in the home screen to shift panels or edge-only swipes so the UI is consistent?

Q) Allow multiple cover actions if available?

Surely it's not beyond Jolla's design capability to come up with an interactive method of configuring these gestures OR allow them to be configurable in a system friendly way that a 3rd party can configure rather than dangerous patching.

I know that nobody at Jolla seems to have a Mac, as evidenced by the shitty MTP/PTP and CalDAV support, but perhaps their designer could walk into an Apple store and check out the Trackpad system preferences applet where it lists all the actions and lets you configure the gesture associated plus shows you a nice animation of what it does. Jolla already have their tutorial app - just expand that into a system prefs.

That way, they can ship their phones in stupid mode so that people used to plain old Android aren't alienated and they can gradually discover gestures like we had in Sailfish 1.0, N9 and iOS is now exploring.

Just as a note, I did recently receive some help with the Sailfish SDK from a guy at Jolla who had access to a Mac. (I know he was running OSX 10.8, so it was a Mac that hadn't been updated in a while...)

I hear this all the time and I don't get it. Why is there an 'or'? I have a status bar and I use peeking all the time. The only thing that is lost is the online status (which I never used anyway but that's beside the point) and I expect that fixed at some point.

Judging by the way basic features are (not) implemented, it seems like nobody at Jolla has ever had a mobile phone. Things like a character/message counter in an SMS editor, forward an SMS, open/create a contact from a received call or SMS, even grouping contacts by categories, have been around for years, if not decades. Releasing a phone in 2013 with any of them missing is inexcusable. Releasing a phone in 2013 with all of them missing is beyond outrageous. Having all of them missing two years and a dozen or so firmware updates later lacks any words to describe it.

And those are things we had on basic phones in 1995, before we even start talking about "smart"phone features, such as the keyboard working the same way in every app, global copy&paste, select and search in the browser or an easy access to the menu without having to scroll all the way to the top of a long list.

My only explanation why this could happen at all is that either no one at Jolla has ever used a mobile phone before or they all have phones that actually work and no one is eating their own dog food.

That is actually an excellent idea.

This is one reason why there is an 'or':

Sailfish UI 1.0 - slight peaking:


Sailfish UI 2.0 - slight peaking:


Here's the other reason (not counting all the states in between):

Sailfish UI 1.0 - finished peaking:


Sailfish UI 2.0 - finished peaking:


It's not that hard to spot the difference (the first is peaking, the second is just a static status bar of SFOS 2.0).


Source: This video by tnkglr and my phone (+the screenshot app by Coderus).

EDIT: I wanted to recreate the exact number of icons in the status area, but the Bluetooth icon wasn't shown at the time when I checked it (so I thought Bluetooth was off) yet it appeared in time to be on the screenshot and I didn't notice before uploading. Great...

Youre just right there!!
With SFOS 2 the status bar is so teeny I have to hold the device really really close my eyes to see even the time!

Oh yes, I forgot that you have to peek the whole 1 cm from the edge to see the status bar:



(I have this patch installed to illustrate the UI's flexibility to those crying for a big clock. Not that I need it even with my old eyes.)

Yup. The status bar on my Android phone is so tiny, I almost never use it to check the time either. I instead use a big, beautiful clock widget on the home screen.

But, when I'm using an app, and I want to check on the status of the device, all the info is right there at the top of the screen; I don't need to do anything to determine the time, the battery status, the connection status, and a few other items. The true value of the status bar is not to check on information when the phone is just sitting there doing nothing, but rather to get status info when you're busy using it for some other purpose.

You're being a bit dishonest here - on the first pic, your finger is clearly 1/3 of the way across the screen. On the second one, it's barely 1/10 of the way.

(I must, however, say that it at least looked more interesting when everything just blended, without the sharp cutoff introduced some updates ago, which only makes some sense when you swipe all the way.)

Thanks for the correction, I forgot to put it as a disclaimer, but it's not that black&white.
Yes, I had a problem finding the right frame in the video as I'd need a frame that is directly in between of the other two frames. On the other hand, the peek doesn't start immediately, so I was able to reproduce my screenshot with almost the same position of fingers as in the video.

You could say the same about the second pair of pictures, where the first picture is further away from the camera, which decreases the readability.

Maybe I would be able to find some better video if I had more time, but it was just an illustration.


It could be 1mm for all I know - I am talking just about the difference between v1.0 and v.2.0. The point is, it's a usability regression just to have more eye candy. Or do you see any advantage of having to reach further (even if it was 1mm) to see the time?

Come on, if I childishly called you out for "crying" every time you put effort into criticizing something, there would be very little discussion.

UI flexibility? I tried to make the exact same patch before this one came out, but gave up, because there's little you can do without making a complex patch (which would be a PIA to update with every release) - you can only increase the font size and have the tradeoff between visibility and ugliness like with this patch. It even breaks the design guidelines for SFOS. Plus it's not just about the clock - all the other status icons were easier to distinguish, which no patch fixed yet.

I can read the tiny text too, but it doesn't make it more comfortable. I don't understand what's the advantage of having a tiny status bar with so much wasted space below:



Maybe you can explain?

FYI, "to cry for something" is an idiom. It means to call for or demand something.