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#21
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Hold on. Today we had an SDK beta release, that will be a more solid beta in one month...

This beta is out now because we (and you) wanted to give as much time as possible to application developers to have their software ready for the final release... [and] to support the Mer project aka Fremantle community edition for N800/N810 giving them as much time as possible to work.
pffffffffffffft....

That's the sound of my high hopes being drained of air.

Thanks for the buzzkill. I was looking forward to a very nice Summer Solstice / Father's Day.

fanoush is going to win, isn't he?
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Last edited by qole; 2009-04-28 at 21:43.
 
eiffel's Avatar
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#22
From the Hildon Interface Guidelines, I don't think the two-touch has been mentioned before:

A two-touch happens when the user taps down with a finger and just after that, without lifting the finger, taps another position with another finger. The two-touch can be used to activate context sensitive menu.
Interesting! And it can be done with a resistive touch screen because it's looking for a "jump" in position without a finger being lifted.

Now here's a possible hardware tidbit, although it may just be noise:

Many devices feature a keyboard either always present or a slide-out one.
I'm trying to imagine which pocket-sized form factor would have an always-present keyboard with an 800x480 screen.

I also enjoyed the suggestion on the last page to design the interface using a thick blunt crayon rather than a sharp pencil. I get a mental image of a roomful of five-year-olds with their crayon sets busy designing Hildon interfaces.

Regards,
Roger
 

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#23
The two-touch is a nice touch, although only time will tell if it'll end up like the pressure sensitivity of the screen. Anyway, it's great they're trying new things and trying to make the best of the current technologies....

Originally Posted by eiffel View Post
I'm trying to imagine which pocket-sized form factor would have an always-present keyboard with an 800x480 screen.
Maybe a device that folds in two so that you need to open it to use the screen. That way you'd have the keyboard there when ever you can see the screen.

Last edited by Naranek; 2009-04-28 at 21:51.
 

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#24
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
Mhm... Actually yes, I always thought they were excellent examples of good ports, that's why I mentioned them in this context.

Anyway, forget those two:
My point was that it's getting even more difficult than it is today if you want to do it right. (And I hope developers want to do The Right Thing.)
The menus may be the most evident example: It'll not be enough to transfer them from horizontal to vertical and remove icons, you'll need to re-design the whole UI from scratch if the original application has more than 10 menu items and some sub-menus.

[snip]
I haven't installed any Alpha or Beta SDK's, but... until we see what is actually involved in porting an application, I wouldn't assume anything.

Right now it usually takes just a few lines of code to reparent the menu. In fact, most of the time it's like just taking the gtk.Menu() and adding it to the window (.set_menu()) instead of the menubar. I would not be at all surprised if 95% of the hildonization of the menu is automatic in Fremantle.
 
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#25
Originally Posted by qgil View Post
Hold on. Today we had an SDK beta release, that will be a more solid beta in one month. "Beta SDK" refers to the platform components providing APIs and the SDK tool itself. But if you are talking about 'new devices brought to you' you need to take into account the components tied to the hardware that are not published in the SDK and the applications that are equally missing there.

This beta is out now because we (and you) wanted to give as much time as possible to application developers to have their software ready for the final release.

This beta is also out now because we (and you) wanted to support the Mer project aka Fremantle community edition for N800/N810 giving them as much time as possible to work.
Thanks for clarifying! It was just wishful thinking on my part.
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#26
Originally Posted by Naranek View Post
The two-touch is a nice touch, although only time will tell if it'll end up like the pressure sensitivity of the screen. Anyway, it's great they're trying new things and trying to make the best of the current technologies....

Maybe a device that folds in two so that you need to open it to use the screen. That way you'd have the keyboard there when ever you can see the screen.
You mean like a Clamshell (as in the Zaurus style) ?
 
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#27
Originally Posted by eiffel View Post
I'm trying to imagine which pocket-sized form factor would have an always-present keyboard with an 800x480 screen.
A plain slate tablet with a split keyboard flanking the display like some of Samsung's and Wibrain's UMPCs. It would be a bit long but it might be possible to make it fit in a pocket.
 
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#28
Originally Posted by qole View Post
[I]pffffffffffffft....
Sorry if that disappointed you. On the other hand, let me remind you that if we would follow your desired schedule probably yourself and surely others would...

blame us for not thinking about the developers giving them the time and the means to have their apps ready before sales start. And not thinking about the users missing dditional applications to install and expand their usage of the device.

blame us for throwing a release out without giving time to have a Extras community process in place and therefore upsetting users for offering them some apps that have installation problem, crash, drain batteries and so on.

probably also blame us for the quality of the software in the first release. Think that the frozen API is also frozen for ouselves.

Then somebody would go down to the us not-learning, not-getting-it and so on.

You want everything and you want it now. That's fine... but we have our timing and priorities to deliver stuff.

If you want to help to have better products sooner a good way to do it is to come up with great applications and a way to make them move from extras-devel to extras-testing and extras, rwaching good and stable quality at the end exposed to Maemo 5 users.
 

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#29
Quim, I never blame Nokia for anything, and I never complain. It's always those other guys. I'm all sweetness and light.

And if I ever said anything that sounded like a complaint, I'm so sorry.

I will never complain again.

Can I have my device now?

(An addict will say anything to get a fix. )
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#30
Originally Posted by kanishou View Post
You can still use standard Gtk menus with sub-menus, it is just not recommended.

Applications designed for the new UI guidelines are very slick, but you can still use all traditional Gtk elements to make ports easier. If something behaves in a totally incompatible way, then it has been implemented as a new Hildon widget instead of changing Gtk functionality. Dialogs are probably the biggest case of changed functionality, but they should generally still work ok without changes.
It looks like the AboutDialog from gtk is not supported ...
 
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