I haven't had time to read this entire thread, but autorotation of the entire UI is a must for me. I champion one handed usage, and with a touchscreen, it is mandatory to have it.
Has anyone looked at Android and how it handles autorotation of the freely placed widgets on its desktops?
I think going forward, since the widgets are freely set, they should have separate placements for landscape and portrait modes, and when rotating, the widgets should animate and move to their new locations with each rotation.
Another is to keep them still and only rotate the content within the widget box, which is a bad idea in my opinion. Keeping the widgets' orientation static as the screen rotates may not suit the content within.
When a software goes to vertical mode, is this his window that rotates 90deg and resized or is it the X Window server?
If it's X Windows, it's no need to rotate 90deg widgets: simply reverse their coordinated X and Y.
And during the first rotation, after placing a Widget, Maemo can correct automatically coordinated of the Widget if it exceeds the screen.
After, be it Maemo which corrects any single the position of the Widget, or be the user moves it, Maemo remembers hes position in horizontal mode and vertical mode.
Thus, the widgets will have different positions for the vertical mode and horizontal mode. Like the very good idea of Elimoon8.
That's not the only noise in the market. Slashgear makes specific mention that one-handed tweeting on-the-go isn't realistic with the unit in their review:
When a software goes to vertical mode, is this his window that rotates 90deg and resized or is it the X Window server?
The thing doing the rendering does this. Nowadays its all GL, so I think Clutter handles this. So the software would check if X > Y or not and tell Clutter to draw horizontally or certically.
PS: MPX and XI2 is only recently being included in X.Org.
I want to create concepts for the n900 desktop rotation. I *may* not have time to do it myself, but I'm sure if the following things were available, *someone* with moderate image editing skills could do it.
Things needed:
- Actual pictures of all 4 desktops from a user. The messier, the better (it'll help to figure out how the rotation will actually work). Remember to blur out anything you don't want us to see.
- A picture of one of those "dialog boxes" that popup near the bottom of the screen (one of those that you can dismiss by just touching outside the information/confirmation box.
- An idea of the actual font used in the n900 system "dialog boxes." This could help make the concept pictures more realistic.
I've red most of the thread and I didn't understand, does it support portrait mode "the first screen after unlocking? Do I need to slide my thumb over a line or just flick the side button. For example, I'm holding it in portrait mode with one hand and what..... always when I unlock it somehow, the calling pad activates...?? I hope I am stupid.....
