Sorry, you're right, I misread it for 'cry about'. Stupid me - of course I know the meaning of 'cry for', it was just that my eyes were tired (you can tell from my previous comment where I mixed 'peek' with 'peak'). Oh well.


Not to waste this comment on an off topic discussion - I wonder if this change (peeking -> status bar) is just an intermediate step before the system-wide status bar is introduced.

Because I don't really see the point of having an always visible status bar where it currently is - who spends much time on the homescreen anyway?

Sure, there were/are people who demanded some kind of persistent status bar from day one, but I doubt they meant 'status bar on the homescreen', instead of 'status bar in all apps'.

I always felt that the answer from Jolla in Sailfish UI 1.0 was "yes, there's no small status bar, but instead there is a large status area just one tiny gesture away". I think the large size was needed too - with the classical persistent status bar, you always know where to look, but with peeking, there's this short moment where you need to adjust to the animation and change of background, so the size of the clock & icons in Sialfish UI 1.0 was a necessity for a comfortable experience.

Now the size is small and it's not one tiny gesture away, so the compensation for not having a global status bar is gone. Is an introduction of a standard status bar the next logical step for SailfishOS with the demise of peeking?

It's an 'or' because it's two clashing UI paradigms.

Fugly, useless status bars v clean, minimalist gesture based UI.

Jeez, people will be asking for burger icons and home buttons next.

Have it your way. I see no clash. Gestures and visuals are orthogonal.

Maybe you should just install i3 on the phone, or is that not minimalist enough yet?

But, there isn't much to peek in sailfish. Hidden clock and statusbar indicators is just a lame excuse for existance of peeking feature. If you could peek into last used apps screen, that would be really useful productivity feature. Or if there's a fullfeatured widget layer to peek into, but covers?..

There are two features birthed by marketing department in sailfish - ambiences and peeking - both are too halfbaked to do anything useful in the os.

Just give a real value to them, Jolla, give'em a real function, let me peek last used app contents, let ambiences be smart and automated (aka profilematic) and also implement 'a pack of cards' type of switcher for quick app switching. Also make swipes configurable in settings, introduce swipe zones, swipe from tophalf or bottomhalf edge of a screen could easily perform different actions, just let this be configurable by an user, to not to confuse first time users too much.

But i doubt anything like this will ever be implemented.

Edit: I think SF v1 was much better conceptually, it felt almost complete on its last iterations with the help of patches. SF v2 is more like moving target, for example, Jolla introduced an 'empty' swipe at the first screen of the app drawer - when you have multiple pages of apps, and you are at the last page, swiping quickly back to first page, you should notice this. It is frustating for a thumb, and not a good design.

Fendi Tsim from Hong Kong made some nice effort to summarize the news in 2.0.0.10. on yt
Yes, nothing much new to us. But nevertheless always good to have the word spread imho.

Exactly. Orthogonal. They don't belong together. That's why it's an 'or'.

Orthogonal as in independent of each other. As proven by the case in hand. You can have the clock and status icons scattered haphazardly all over the place like in SFOS 1.x or organized neatly in one status bar like in SFOS 2.x, but the way to get to them is exactly the same gesture.

Yes it is possible to have both independently. However there are some combinations that work better.

There is a reason why widget based UIs have a clock widget (At least Android and Symbian) even if they display it in the status bar : it is too small to be easy to read.
However, as the status bar is everywhere, it is still possible to check it (a bit difficult however) without a kind of peaking.

In Sailfish OS, the status bar is not there everywhere to gain some real estate on the screen (a feature I really like). So to check status and time, there is a need for the peaking system. However, by design, the peaking adds some gradual transparency overlay, so that with small peaking, the contrast is not that good. If the icons/time is small, it gets difficult to read, especially while on the move where only a quick check is possible (like when walking, and checking time from a map application). There, it makes more sense to follow the idea from sailfish OS 1.0 : make them big enough than it is easy and quick to read, no matter the transparency level and ambient light.

I am not always looking at my phone from my couch where a status bar is big enough. I use my phone also on the move (checking address, train departure time, messages...) where the ability to use the phone single handed, and with things big enough to be fast and painless to read is a benefit. It was a point that I found Sailfish OS 1.0 had a lot better than Android, but in 2.0 it is on par, maybe even less readable in Sailfish (contrast being worse due to progressive transparency in peaking and wallpaper, where android has it 100% white on black).

My 2 cents...

I have to take my glasses off to read the tiny icons in a status bar. They're utterly useless irritating little wastes of space spamming up my phone or tablet. I've 14 of the little buggers at the top of this tablet's screen now and there's only 4 that I know for sure what they are.

The gesture required to use them involves one hand putting my glasses on my head, squinting at some tiny icons, putting my glasses back on. You have to stop walking, riding or driving to do this. Who invented this? A notification system that notifies me of trivial Rubbish that requires I stop what I'm doing to read them. And the fix is another device, the smartwatch!

On Sailfish 1.0, they used big icons and huge fonts. Yeah you can do it still on 2.0 but now you've also got status bar spam, just like Android, which has the worst notification system of any OS going and yet people copy it. Even Apple did instead of copying Nokia's event view/fastlane.

It just worries me that in an effort to appease who cry for Android like features, we're cluttering up the UI with noise.