Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I'm really disappointed about the interface on OS2008, mainly because it has so much wasted potential.

[rant]It is really bothersome that it seems like the interface is designed 50% for finger navigation and 50% for stylus navigation. You have things that are wonderful for the finger like the Application Menu. It couldn't be easier or faster to navigate your way through the different categories and find the app you want, its great.

Now lets say I use my thumbs to launch the Control Panel in seconds and what do I see? I see a bunch of very thin icons with text next to them that are tough to click on without a stylus, and on top of that - take a look at the scroll bar. Clearly set to stylus friendly width. The kicker is that there is actually plenty of room for a finger wide scroll bar on the Control Panel.

What else do we have... Contacts. This one is great because half of the app is finger oriented and the other half stylus. On the right side we have very thin categories (All, Online, Recent, etcetera) and a bar that separates the left side which would never be grabbed without the help of a stylus. Then on the left we have nice wide fields with icons and a big finger sized scroll bar. So what... we need to get the stylus out to select the contact category on the right then we can easily navigate with our fingers on the left? Also when you try to add a contact you are greeted with incredibly thin fields for inputting information but right at the bottom of that same box there are decently sized finger friendly buttons. None of that would really be an issue except there is zero flow when trying to go from stylus to finger input or vice versa, it is terribly inefficient.

Riddle me this - Why are the drop down menus of each application so small and stylus oriented? The Application Menu has such a well done finger interface, why can't the drop down menus use the same size/width and model (cascading lists)? There is plenty of room on the screen and the method has already been proven and written.

The Application Manager is nearly the exact opposite as the Control Panel. Whereas the Application manager is a very finger friendly application (except for the scroll bar) the control panel is the finger's bane (as mentioned above). Why on earth are there two different applications on the same system that are so vastly different? Can't we just make all the applications either one or the other? My personal preference would be finger input, but honestly I think I'd rather have either then both at the same time.[/rant]

This is just a short list of examples of contradictory finger/stylus oriented applications, I wish developers would just pick one, or maybe give us options for what we'd like to use. It really is a shame because the N810 has such a nice touch screen. The pressure needed to interpret an input is so little, it almost feels like active touch. With such a good screen its unfortunate that half of our applications are still using stylus input which was originally made to help a person make one point of input, which we can now easily do with the finger.

Can I get an amen?

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Yeah what the heck? I get a bit frustrated with this problem as well. I find myself hold the stylus in my mouth so I can type, finger & tap. What would be real nice is a scroll wheel on the right side similar to a blackberry.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I don't even think we need any hardware modifications, it can all be done with the software with a few smart choices in the GUI area. I generally end up holding my stylus between a few of my fingers while I type with my thumbs. Its annoying putting the stylus away and getting it back out, and especially having to hold it while I type.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I definitely agree with you.

And yes, you can change the size of the icons in the control panel by clicking on the menu bar (top left of screen), click on view, large icons.

I think, for the new OS, they should integrate all of our main requests/complaints. It shouldn't be all that complicated....but then again, this is Nokia we're talking here. Maybe they just couldn't make up their minds and decided to make OS2008 both finger AND stylus friendly? IMHO, it doesn't make that much sense.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I missed that, thanks. However ironically it means I have to do more scrolling with the stylus friendly scroll bar : (

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

How can we get developers to work on new and better finger UIs?

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Personally, I would rather see a user definable choice (in control panels, perhaps), which would let the user decide if they want finger or stylus control.

I know I fall in the stylus camp, and would rather see more menu items (stylus size), than fewer. But I know there are others who prefer finger-ing.

But I agree the Maemo guys need to give developers a central preference check API, which depending on the user's choice, the app will select finger or stylus method.

Craig...

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I agree with this rant.

I think about 80% of finger-usability issues could be cured with a "fat" scroll bar instead of the thin one, and bigger icons.

It'd be nice not to have to dig out the stylus, if you don't want to.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Just get rid of scrollbars - all applications should support page scrolling... the fat scrollbar is an abomination, and the mix of control methods is indicative of a complete lack of any unified vision within Nokia - this should all have been put to bed with OS 2006, certainly OS 2007.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I agree, fat scroll bars are ugly, but they are very functional. Page scrolling should definitely be supported, or they could also use arrows at the bottom of pages like on the Application Menu.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Thats a good idea !

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

First off, amen to the rant that started this post. And personally, I don't even consider it so much a rant as much as it is a wake up call to really work better towards a unified user interface. It was very clear to me that whomever led the team for 2007 got an ability to step up (or was moved out for someone else) for 2008. Now, before 2009, can we see something in the way of standarized UI conventions, because that will go a long way towards heightening the user experience of the tablet as a whole.

Excellent idea; and one that I hope can be done as well.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

+1.

But, I have found that by letting the outside edge of my right thumbnail grow like a finger-pickin' guitarist's nails then I can nail scroll quite well.

Maybe we could adopt this as a secret sign - a sort of geek equivalent of the Free Mason's rolled up trouser leg.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I hope that they release some additional updates to OS2008 instead of making us wait a year until 2009.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Another vote for user preference. I'm a stylus person, I hate the huge menus in OS2008. Mind you, I like FB reader's thump scrolling and would like that to be included in more apps such as the browser. HOlding the thing in 2 hands the side of my thumb just thumps the screen and it scrolls.

Zebee

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Any suggestions as to how we actually make some of these ideas happen instead of just talking about it?

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Who is "we"?

Unless Nokia sort an API then there's not much people can do. If the current OS setup hardcodes menu sizes then it does.

THe only ones who can sort really are Nokia. I suppose if an app has internal menus that they have that much control over they could make a setting, but how many do?

Zebee

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I very much concur with the rant. I do so miss the 'smart' UI which would detect if the user was navigating with his/her thumb or the stylus and display menu and entries accordingly.

It would be nice if the OS2008 team worked on this a bit to get things back to the way it was in OS2007 (at least)

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

One of the things I like about "modest" -- most (but not all) of the scroll bars are fat enough to use with your finger. Maybe a little too fat, but better than the stylus sized ones.

Better would be:

a) a thin (stylus sized) scroll bar
b) finger scrolling, with inertia

Then, the scroll bar acts as a progress/location indicator, but the finger scrolling eliminates the need to have a fat scroll bar.

But, until they implement inertial finger scrolling on all of the apps, I would like to see more apps with fat scroll bars.


Best, I think, would be user choices for all of the modes (selectable in the application's menu, just as full screen and "view tool bar" are selectable within the application's menu):

1) Scroll bar is: a) fat, or b) thin

2) Dragging causes: a) inertial scrolling, or b) selecting text/image area

of course, I'd also like to see a way to force a context menu to come up, since it's a pain in the *** to force on microb... but that's a whole other can of worms.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Hi everybody. Benz145 and others are certainly on this issue, the design is part finger, part stylus currently.

For the OS2008 release, compared to OS2007, we added a lot of support for finger usability. Due to many reasons, not really design-related but mostly pragmatic, we couldn't go and change every application and every widget to be finger-usable. But then again, I personally think it's better to start somewhere and think in the long term. The alternative to the realization that we couldn't change everything at once would have been not to do anything.

However, I guess you can certainly interpret the first changes as the signal towards the developments that will continue in the future. :)

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I thought this feature was fantastic, a real sign of an "intelligent" ui that put usability and user choice to the fore.

I love the look of the new big finger icons etc, but then it's ruined by the virtual inability to call up the thumboard on screen. I still think this is deliberate as a 810-led thing, ie that if you want to use a thumboard you'll use the physical one, and if you're typing onscreen you'll be using a stylus. Obviously not so for 800 owners.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

You're right on that. Once they get this sorted out, things will be so much better :)

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I've had the N800 for a year and never use the thumboard, no matter what OS. I rarely use my bt keyboard, either.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

- i use a BT keyboard when the n800 sits on the desktop....

- but not when on the go... and then i usually use the stylus...

- but i do like the idea of a secret fingernail society...

:-)

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Umm.. does that mean everything will be big and us stylus users will be cursing forever more?

Please please make it user selectable. Intelligent selection based on what you are actually using would be wonderful, but I'll settle for a control panel whatsit that means I can turn all finger-sized menus and such off.

I would also love for the FBReader scrolling to be standard everywhere.

Zebee

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I am sorry, cant help but tell you all, reading the title made me giggle.


bun

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

It worries me that more and more of the precious screen estate will be taken up with fat finger scrollbars, my suggestion chimes with Milhouse's (as discussed in #2564): a small scrollbar or other visual indicator and page/widget-level scrolling through dragging.

Certainly, the fat scrollbars are usable. But they're fugly, and waste space.

If drag-to-scroll is implemented properly, at the Gtk+ widget level, almost everything will get it for free; and the OS will have a unified field out-of-the box.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

EDIT: AMEN!


Great commentary. I must say I liked very much the concept of the menus and input derived from the touch sensitivity 'recognition' that would give you an appropriate menu based on your finger or pen input. That worked decently enough in OS2007, why not now and better in this OS2008?
This new OS zips along quite fast and from my fairly newb view, has more flexibility for programming. It should have been easy to carry on with the either/or recognition for the main menu and the virtual keyboard.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I can't say here much, but don't worry: No to fat scrollbars or fat scroll buttons.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

on my Palm Treo/centro the program Snapper mail has a small scroll bar but when you touch it with your finger it expands to a fat finger scroll bar but when you hit it with the stylus it remains small.
kind of like the old os2007 when you touched the screen with your finger it brought up the thumbboard and with the stylus it brought up the small keyboard.
the touch screen senses a wide area pressed versus a small area and the program adjusts accordingly.

also I would like to see the 4way d switch used more for scrolling and such.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

What benefits does the stylus have over the finger? Non that I can think of, but I'm not a stylus kind of guy. The only thing I can thing of is that it allows more things on the screen at once because they can be smaller. I really think if people work on the GUI we can implement everything we need to be usable via touch instead of stylus.

If we are going to implement inertia scrolling I think scrolling itself on the N810 needs to be fixed first. I'm not sure if it is because the N810 isn't fast enough, or the code just needs to be improved, but when you scroll down through lists there is tons of horizontal tearing, and it looks very poor.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

Mainly more things to choose from.

I had 6 bookmarks, I could see 3, and had to scroll. With a stylus I can see and find far more quickly.

Plus the fat finger things are ugly. Bloated. They offend my aesthetic sense.

I dislike ugly UIs, the 2008 UI had so many ugly things. They made the left side front page icons coloured and ugly, and the status bar icons monochrome and ugly. Adding bloated menus just topped it off.

Zebee

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I suppose we'll never see eye to eye with this, but for me seeing 3 items on a finger enabled menu isn't a problem because scrolling is so easy, and I don't have to try to type with the N810's keyboard while holding the stylus in my fingers. I also don't even need to get the stylus out lol.

Speaking of which I read some people mentioning a soft thumb keyboard on the N800, does such a thing exist on the N810? I know it has a stylus board. There is a setting under Text input settings>On-screen which says "Launch finger keyboard with finger tap", but it sounded like the finger/stylus differential detection wasn't part of OS2008 from previous posts.

Edit: Well I don't know exactly what I did but somehow I apparently launched the finger keyboard... I can't relaunch it though lol.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I can't imagine trying to do a fine drawing in the sketch app with my finger. A stylus is good for fine precision pointing, things where a finger is too fat. Drawing is the main one I can think of, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are others.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I definitely agree there, its funny to see sketch apps on the iPod Touch because they have no real use lol. I've never been a fan of touchscreen drawings, are they really that important? Maybe I'm just bad at art, but I couldn't think of any real practical uses of a sketch app...

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I've been in meetings wehre things are being sketched on the board, and, yeah, it's nice to be able to duplucate that sketch on my N810.

I'm fine with the stylus being ENTIRELY optional -- just something you use for detail work when you need detail, but I don't see a reason for eliminating the stylus from the device as a whole.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I use Xournal a lot for jotting notes. The stylus is necessary for even semi-legible writing. Other than that, I wouldn't use the stylus much at all of the apps were right. The one place, maybe, would be the stylus-board, nicer than the thumb-board for IMing and such. (You can see the other person's messages as they come in.) Of course, a good transparent floating thumb-board cures this, too...

The menu scrolls so nicely now, it's not so bad not fitting everything on one page. But I do miss the ability to nest menus. I had everything on OS2007 sorted so there was no scrolling at all. Now, the less-used stuff requires scrolling.


Benz:
You have to really thumb-thump to get the finger-board up; they removed the sensitivity setting for this, although I intend to hunt around in gconf, where a setting may still lurk...
They only removed the stylus-finger detection for menus, it's just crippled for the keyboard.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

On my N800, I just lived with not seeing the other person's IM's as I typed.

On the N810, I just use the slide-out keyboard for that. Perfect :-)

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I understand the stylus is probably in important input method for those using the N800 but the built in keyboard on the N810 really gets the job done nicely.

Re: Finger or stylus, PLEASE make up your mind!
 

I have no trouble calling up the thumbboard (fingerboard?). There's a control panel For "Text Input Settings" and with "Launch finger keyoard with finger tap" checked, I either get the thumbboard right away or, if the stylusboard comes up, I get to the thumbboard by tapping with my finger again in the input area. At least that works in the browser and Notes utility.


(I feel presumptuous and stupid offering advice to someone who's been an IT user way longer than me, but maybe you missed something. Or maybe this is useful for someone else.)