Notices

Ok, Pierogi 1.1.34 is on its way up to extras-devel, with a fix to work correctly even when the tab bar does not scroll.

Please excuse this post that turned into a wall of text, it maybe disjointed as I have been back over it several times

Well after seeing this I thought I would try and play with getting Pierogi working in portrait on the N900.
It is something we spoke about a good while ago now, it would be nice to allow Pierogi to work in both orientations, especially with Android version looming. Currently the only way to see how Pierogi works in portrait is with CSSU's forcedrotation enabled. So I re-enabled this and had a play...

Upon poking about in the sources of 1.1.33 I spotted you have started making a portrait friendly version of the main panel. Looks good BTW I hope to see it functional.
TBH most of the panels are now usable in portrait, some work perfectly the Menu for example, the keypad panel has a couple of buttons that have text overlap.
Anyway I with you working on new stylesheets at the moment I thought I'd poke about elsewhere.
However, while I was poking about, one thing I remembered I mentioned a while ago was that your preferences panels on all your pasta's work poorly in portrait mode. So I had a go at 'fixing' it in Pierogi as an example.
See the attached file and screenshots.

A few notes, with this layout text inside items cannot be too long, this is why pushbutton and checkbox text has been cut down a lot.
There is no easy way to word wrap text in these items so I suggest that if you like and wish to use my example, that the Macro File button needs to change. The content on the button needs to be a QLabel which has the wordwrap option. This is checked, see the default keyset bit, for example. This could would be the way to add addition information above an item if it will not fit.
The button would then be used just to open the file select dialog. Maybe with "Select File..."
I didn't want to mess about with the source to do this, especially now you have since released another version.

Right that's my playing about out of the way, now I have found a minor bug while playing about in prefs panel. The "Use default keyset for all volume control" (I am glad I cut that text down on my version ) checkbox is not disabled and also can be checked even if no Default Keyset is selected. This only happens if you have never used this item before. You can actually see this in my screenshots. Hopefully you understand what I am getting at if not I can explain further in another post.

Now for my ideas I think you could make the former tab bar, new list widget, more usable now.
Personally I would move "Choose Panels" and "Choose Favourites" up to the Action Menu.
I would also then IMO group "Select Keyset", "Automated Keyset Search" and Browse Partial List" under one action item. Reasoning for the latter being I have noted a few people still don't understand why there device isn't in the device list. If they where a list of methods to find a keyset that would make more sense, all IMO of course.

Finally in addition to my ideas above I think the option to move the new listwidget to the bottom of the page would be handy. I feel this new flicky listwidget would be easier to use with my thumb along the bottom of the screen than the top. I would assume this could be possible in a similar way to switching the volume and channel buttons.

Anyway thank you for making it this far, hopefully you didn't mind me poking about in your application too much and my rambling are useful.

Thank you for all the comments! I at least have no problems with a wall of text. Let me start by saying that I do want to bring all the portrait-mode layouts over to the N900 side. (There's a lot of GUI code that is, unfortunately, not going to be portable between the two OSs. But at least the panels can be shared between the two platforms.)

Actually, that particular layout is very, very old. I started on a portrait-mode version of Pierogi a long time ago, but after realizing just how much work it would be (basically, I would have needed to re-layout every single screen in the entire app), I kinda gave up on it.

Now, with Android, I'm having to re-layout every single screen in the entire app, so I guess I should have done the work after all.

Yeah, the big thing here is that I can't use the vertical space nearly as efficiently as the horizontal space, as English is a very horizontal language. (I've lately been wondering if I couldn't just label all my portrait-oriented buttons in, say, Chinese...) I'm abbreviating everything where I can, but for a lot of the layouts on Android, I'm starting to reach the point where I'm putting no more than two buttons in any single row, just so I can fit usable labels onto them.

I've looked at some of the other IR software available on Android, and pretty much all of them just dump loads of tiny tiny buttons with tiny tiny icons onto the screen. They do look a lot like real remote controls, but I have no idea how people manage to use them... Anyway, end of rant.

Yup, I've been discovering that myself.

Yes, thanks! But I have to admit I've been doing quite a bit of "wordwrap" on the Android version as well. (I really was spoiled by doing everything in landscape mode for so long...)

Drat, thanks for catching that. I've been doing a bit better lately at trying to make sure unusable options are disabled, but the default volume controls are from way back at the start of Pierogi; I've probably got a lot of other items that need to be cleaned up hiding in the older sections of code.

Hmm. I could see doing that for the "Choose Panels" option; I probably need to completely re-think that concept, now that lots more panels can fit into a single set. But should the favourites control be sent away as well? I myself use that a lot more often to switch between favorites than using the volume rocker. It'd be a hassle to keep going up to the menu just to switch between them...

I agree completely. I've gotta think a little bit about how to do that in a user-friendly way, but you're right, these two need to be combined.

This is a very cool idea! (Actually, it's also possible to move the tab bar to the bottom of a standard tab widget, but for some reason I never saw any value in that.) You could never get away with this on Android, since you'd always be running into the control buttons at the bottom of the screen, but it should be no trouble on an N900. I'll give it a shot.

Just a quick reply to your question
I see your point, I have always used the rocker switch to do this.
It seems quicker and being right handed I always seemed to hit the taskswitcher button reaching over with my thumb.
I can understand moving either of them would be controversial to people that use them.
However, bare in mind the amount of room you need to swipe the listwidget about. Currently in portrait orientation it's difficult to swipe at the listwidget, my idea was to free this up more by relocating the icons either side.

you could also use vertical like tabs, but I think it will look weird though. Faircrack is using that in landscape mode, scroll to the screenshots to see what I mean.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=69009

Also I think sixwheeledbeast suggestion is a good idea: about placing them on a seperate line, so you have more space for the scrolling tabs.

And I always use the rocker to switch keysets too. I hold the N900 with my left hand and I use my right hand to control the screen...

Before you make all the effort of trying to get portrait working, is it any useful? As the way I hold my phone in portrait then my hands cover the IR-thingy.

Hmm. Are those actual text buttons, or has he rotated some text in a paint program and turned them into icons? Not that I couldn't do that as well, but that introduces lots of problems... But yeah, putting the panel selector controls on the side rather than on the top or bottom can provide lots more valuable screen real estate.

Hmm, I never really thought the rocker control would be that popular. I really do need to at least make the on-screen button optional, if folks just aren't using it...

Yeah, that was my excuse for putting it off. I didn't think it'd be useful enough to warrant the time and effort. But, now that I'm doing it for Android (and I think I'm like 80% - 90% there), there's no reason not to just copy the files back into the N900's source code.

Agreed

But surely your just moving the issue to the other orientation?
In fact wouldn't it make less space in the main panel?

It's not about where the port is for me, it's about the feel of the UI.
The port could be moved, you could get a uUSB IR device working or maybe Neo900 will be in a different/multiple location.
If all applications worked in both orientations this would mean forcedrotation could be disabled and locking the UI can be done via the CSSU h-d widget.

Well, if I could get the text to rotate 90 degrees, that really would take up a lot less space. (Although it would provide fewer visible tab labels -- basically, the same problem I was facing in portrait mode.)

Yeah, this is basically the argument that finally got me -- I have in front of me now a piece of hardware with a port in a different location. So, I finally have some serious motivation to do the hard work.

Well, this is the thing, isn't it? Some apps were only designed to be used in one orientation (and, honestly, I think I had a good excuse for mine). So, they set the flag to force a single orientation. (BTW, I'm setting the "portrait-mode only" flag on Android, since all the hardware I've seen have CIR ports on the portrait-top of the phone. So far, the other Android IR apps I've seen do that as well.)

Along comes the CSSU, with the ability to invalidate the flag, and poof! Your app now "doesn't work."

I can just imagine that, once the portrait mode goes in, instead of receiving complaints that "your app looks horrible in portrait mode!", I'll be receiving the complaint that "I'm pointing the phone straight at the TV and nothing is happening!"

As I am sure we have spoke about this before forcedrotation was never recommended, it was to be used by devs to locate and potentially fix none portrait compatible applications only.
Unfortunately it seemed to be adopted by some as a userland feature at that time.

Well there will always one , I am sure a nice "Make sure the path between your IR port and the device is clear" initial dialog message would sort that out

I've just updated...one of my favorite keysets, Magnavox set top box, is gone from my list of favorites. It looks like there is now "Magnavox STB", so I guess you deleted or renamed the one I had favorited?