MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

Hello!

Changing properties of Maemomapper during car drive (for me) is often hard and even dangerous (when traffic is high). I tried to design finger-friendly screen (available over some hardware key or by some clickable area semi-transparently displayed over map). It includes (in my humble opinion) most often used functions (during car drive).

I used standard GTK components, to simplify design and development.

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/5306/maemome8.th.png

Center Map:
- Lead
- Position (-> Lon/Lat)
- Disable (-> Disable & reset)

Route
- Add (-> New)
- Load
- Reset (-> Clear)

GPS:
- Enable
- Disable

Sound
- Enable (-> Enable voice commands)
- Disable (-> Disable voice commands)

Autodownload
- Enable
- Disable

Close (-> Hide screen)

It is only shy proposal :)

Regards!

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

I'd say some semi-transparent button overlays along an edge or two would be useful here. I'll get around to putting together a mockup sometime this week. :D

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

heh, i would love a similar system for manually downloading maps. auto download isnt always wanted, and the current way of manually downloading is cumbersome in the amount of menu and dialog drilling one have to do.

if one could zoom so desired area was shown, hit a download button or key, and then select level or levels wanted by overlay buttons?

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

Nice to see that people are working on this. Meamo Mapper is awesome but has a really bad UI considering it was made for tablets...

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

I would find useful a button to create waypoint from the current GPS location with auto generated name.

Anyway thanks for a great application.

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

Just because it doesn't work very well for finger-tapping, doesn't make it a bad tablet UI. Maemo Mapper was designed for stylus operation, mostly because it was created before finger-tapping operation became stylish. Panning around the map is easy to do with your fingers, but most other operations require the stylus.

Personally, I still hate finger-tapping, maybe because I don't like having to constantly clean my screen. But I'll see what I can do about overlaying some on-screen, finger-accessible buttons, at least for zooming.

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

Second to that: The on screen xoom buttons (as is in the Maps application) could be very useful when used in car... Please consider adding this feature.

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

Gnuite,

Maemo Mapper is a great piece of software. I really love it :) When I use it with stylus at office or home, it works great and I enjoy using it. But, in fact, there are two different types of usage - stylus-oriented (mentioned above) and finger-oriented. There are a lot of users prefering first option, and a lot the second. In car, when driving, the second one is the only one :) So please consider also finger-oriented interface. It will make Maemo Mapper usable in wider types of situations.

Regards,
Kelcon

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

Your point is well taken, but I want to take this opportunity to stress that most of Maemo Mapper's features are not meant to be used in the car while driving. A finger-tappable interface would admittedly make this use case safer, but even after adding finger-tap-friendly buttons, I still wouldn't recommend doing anything other than panning/zooming while driving, and even those simple actions should be taken with care.

If you need to change your route, or anything more complicated than panning or zooming, then please pull over the car or get a passenger to help you. I do not want Maemo Mapper to be responsible for causing car accidents.

Re: MaemoMapper Design / Usability
 

There are GPS units available that won't even let you make any adjustments if they sense the car is in motion. The liability issue is real. That said, the ability to get into the menus while in full-screen mode would be useful, instead of having to exit that, do what you want, and then re-enable full-screen mode.

I'm still getting the "processing maps" dialog, which just stays there, and the progress meter never moves. It stayed up during a 3-hour trip today, which I had driven many times, and had the maps downloaded and in the database. I don't know what causes it, but it is a slight annoyance. I exited MM, restarted it, and the dialog went away, but came back soon.