Never. My posts may be inconsistent because I keep mixing my point of view as an end user with that of the UI designer in me (and the two of them don't always agree), but my arguments never fail. It's me, after all. How could I be wrong?
If people didn't attempt to reinvent the wheel or solve non-existent problems we wouldn't have progress or diversity.
The way I see it, we have progress because people identify problems and solve them. And we have progress because people are trying to solve the secrets of the world surrounding us.
There is a faint possibility of progress by just fooling around for no purpose (in fact, that's what nature does: evolution), but if we took this way for comuters, we'd still be using punchcards as a UI.
Either way, rather than complain about what is being proposed, just use what you like and leave the trial and error to those of us interested in new tech.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. You know the game:
The market is driven by hypes and media attention rather than by reason. Consumers don't make choices. Managers do. And they choose every media's darling du jour for integration in their next devices. Letting the hype build up and not at least trying to speak some words of warning (like: "Do you know which functions you use on your browser? Did you check if Fennec offers these basic functions at all? Copy/Paste, anyone?") is grossly negligent.
All the people who are mesmerized now because they can slide the internet to the left an to the right... You need to ask them now if this is want they want a browser to do. Or if they'd rather want a possibility to copy a phone number over to their SIP clients, send a link via email, save the time tables for offline viewing in case they won't have 3G access later when they need them.... and so on.
If they answer: No, sliding left and right all day long is fun, and I've never copied anything from a browser to another applicaton anyway, then it's fine. Really. But for those who do need any of these functions (or others Fennec lacks, but MicroB offers) it might have been important that the topic was raised and they were reminded of their actual needs.
Yeah, its all just hypes. Multi touch is useless. Using your finger as pointer device is useless. Nokia is following an Apple hype. We should all go back using stylus, or better yet keep 2 with you in case you want to eat some rice
All the people who are mesmerized now because they can slide the internet to the left an to the right... You need to ask them now if this is want they want a browser to do. Or if they'd rather want a possibility to copy a phone number over to their SIP clients, send a link via email, save the time tables for offline viewing in case they won't have 3G access later when they need them.... and so on.
If they answer: No, sliding left and right all day long is fun, and I've never copied anything from a browser to another applicaton anyway, then it's fine. Really. But for those who do need any of these functions (or others Fennec lacks, but MicroB offers) it might have been important that the topic was raised and they were reminded of their actual needs.
That's what party poopers like me are for.
You mostly just flame with your scroll from right to left. Cut it out.
I'd just use Weave and copy/paste it there. Or write it over. I can't figure out copy/paste on Symbian either. Certainly I haven't missed it just like I would not miss MMS on my phone. Yet others miss it. Maybe rightfully so.
Since we're speaking open source software here instead of Church of Corporation.. did they whine on forums? Or file a bug report? I think the latter is a very useful thing to do if it frustrates you this much...
My point was not that it makes her experience invalid. Heck, by now there is a representable group of people who have used touch UIs. My point is merely that it scews her expectations.
Well, remember, it's not that she immediately tried to drag things around like it was Safari -- in fact, that would have started revealing panels. Her expectations that a touch UI lets you drag canvases around should have helped her.
The interface simply DID NOT give her a clear and salient starting point to work with. Her main expectation was that it should look like a web browser (e.g., with a location bar) when it first starts up. It didn't and that was the problem.
The question here is how big of a problem is this really? It's not -- there aren't that many people who would randomly just download Firefox Mobile without reading a bit about the new touch UI first on the page they download it from. Hell, it's likely the reason why they WILL try it.
Again, the default state isn't *broken,* it's just poor (i mean literally, as in the opposite of rich), and testing a "cold start" with someone was just my way of providing evidence that there is room for improvement.
Just noticed this (although there is a Mozilla bug report filed) -- Fennec has a big problem with active sites like Google Docs & Google Maps. These sites want to define certain behaviors for double-click / double-tap and dragging for other purposes, but that fails b/c Fennec wants double-tap to zoom and dragging to pan the browser window. I wonder how many other sites have this problem? Probably any other map sites for starters.
So far I've been unable to enter a password because the shift key isn't recognized nor can I enter any text using the onscreen keyboard.
theillien:
I'm having the same problem with passwords. In Gmail by example, I can enter my user ID but the password field remains blank no matter what I try to type. Handwriting won't work either.
I'm using a N800. Did you manage to solve this problem?
