Many of us are eagerly awaiting PR1.2 and the promised arrival of folders in the app screen homeview (or whatever it is called) sometime in the first half, or perhaps first quarter, of next year.

In the meantime a partial solution has been released in the form of the app "Folders" which has its own thread over on my-meego.com.

I tried that and though I think it's great the developer went to the effort of writing and releasing this app, it doesn't satisfy me for a few reasons

(1) The most obvious one is that it doesn't replace the native app screen in Harmattan. That may be a technical challenge that the developer hasn't gotten to, or it may be infeasible given the restraints of aegis, I don't know, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. That means Folders has to run as a separate app, which partially defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. It also goes against the design principles of the UI of the N9, and it just makes using the phone a bit clunkier even though at the same time it can be more efficient.

(2) It's not very customizable. Right now, for example, once you've created your custom folder categories, you can't change their names or the order in which they appear, though the developer may add this feature to a future release. And there is a quick launch bar at the bottom which takes up quite a lot of space, and no option to turn it off. And again, you can't change the application names, and in some cases (such as Fennec/Firefox) it displays the wrong name, and in others (like Opera) it doesn't display the icon properly.

(3) Although I like the idea of displaying four 'top' apps in each category, and then opening a sub-menu for the others, it doesn't make very good use of the screen real estate of the N9, and I can only see four or so categories at once without scrolling. I would like an option of having nothing but folders displayed, so I can see all my categories in one screen, instead of the current layout. One way to do that would be to have up to 12 categories in two columns accessed by swiping left or right with your finger over the relevant icon, with a swipe back to get back to the folders view, which would be cool as it would involve no buttons for submenus at all, and would dispense with two motions to get at an app in a folder (scroll then button press). Or 10 categories and the option of a 'quick launch bar' at the bottom.

(4) It doesn't support landscape mode (which the native app homescreen now does).

So I've decided to uninstall Folders and I came up with my own 'workaround' to not having folders that I think will tide me over until PR1.2. The basic idea is to have all my apps arranged in groups (which I can do natively by moving the icons around) preceded by a 'dummy app' which is a name or symbol or letter that makes obvious (to me) what the category of the following group is. That way I see all my 'folders' in a flat view which I can just scroll up or down as needed. In my case I chose letters representing the categories I wanted, in yellow, that are very different from the standard squircle icons and so stand out as 'markers' of the groups/categories. The result is something like this:



It's certainly not perfect, but it does the job, and it doesn't mean having to run a separate app, and it supports landscape. Now if I wanted to tidy it up a bit more an didn't mind wasting some screen real estate, and also only wanted it to work in portrait mode, I could also create 'dummy' apps that are just blank, and position those to create a sort of 'line-break' after the last app of every category, so that every new category/group starts on a new line. That would make it even more 'folder-like'.

The basic procedure was first to create 80x80 png graphics files of the images I wanted to use (just letters in the alphabet in my case using the 'chalkduster' font), using non-squircle shapes on purpose (to stand out) and a bright colour. Then I put these somewhere and created .desktop files in /usr/share/applications with the names I wanted to use and paths to the graphics icons. That was it. If anyone wants more of a detailed step-by-step breakdown I could do that, but I think the creation of .desktop files is well documented, or you can simply copy an existing .desktop file and modify and use that (which is what I did).

An enhancement to this approach would be to use, instead of 'dead' icons that don't do anything, have them open a separate app showing all the icons of that category which would automatically close when an icon is touched, and remove the .desktop files for all except the top three you want in any one category. That would give you a nice screen of categories (opening a separate page) and three top icons for each category, right there in the native homescreen. It wouldn't be as pretty in landscape, but it would still work.

Nice ( free ) workaround while everybody is waiting for PR 1.2 to fix this

brilliant folder idea! i like it, can you upload the folder icons( they look nice) in this thread?

folder solution in pr 1.2, nokia will proably copy ios folder solution.

yes ! If someone of you can attach the png already ready to put would be pretty nice

Nice Trick

nice.. can you write a how-to?

nice but it wastes too much screen space

1.
Create a 80x80px.png with Text of category.
Create a black 80x80px.png ( B.png )

2. Create file.desktop

Copy all to /home/user/.local/share/applications


Thats it.


Sorry for my English


Rename the Attachments from xxx.desktop.txt to xxx.desktop

How does iPhone implement folders? I hope Nokia comes up with a swipe solution instead of a button solution.

I will upload my icons when I get a chance. I didn't do the type of trick superjunior has done because of the wasted screen space and it wouldn't work on landscape, though it looks good on portrait.

And here's a request. If there is someone reading this with some basic coding skills, I think we could implement an even better solution. Basically instead of each icon label being 'dead', if it opened a program that just displayed a bunch of icons (corresponding to that category) that was set so that it closes automatically when you navigate away from it, we'd have a pretty good folder solution. Then for each category you'd have a separate app that opens a screenful of icons, followed by three 'favourites', and that would take up a single row in portrait. Clicking on the category name would open the full screen of icons for that category. Swiping right would get you back to the main screen of icons, clicking on an icon would open that app and the app displaying that screenful of icons would automatically close, and swiping in another direction would cancel the whole operation and the app showing the screenful of icons would also close.

I think someone who knows how to code could get that up and running very quickly. It would require some work for manual installation (deleting .desktop files in /usr/share/applications that other than the three favourites for each category and making sure these were registered somehow for each app corresponding to each category) but it would be doable.

Any takers for this little project?

I'll do it.