You're definately right.. I just thought of posting that idea here since it's related to the topic and it's really a very rough sketch as you can see.. maybe someone can polish it and post it in the correct "brainstorm" topic?
As noted above, I'll take that on. I've just been too sick the past couple of days to organize my thoughts beyond posting meaningless gibberish... heh. But I'm starting to feel better other than a nagging migraine, and while I watch the Dallas Cowboys mangle the Seattle Seahawks today I'll be doing some Brainstorm work.
I have read this whole entire thread.. And I agree with the community.. The phone app should have those filters and I do think that it won't make it complicated or anything like that..
Here's a VERY ROUGH sketch (because I am using MS Paint and it's 3:15 AM and I am extremely tired) of IMHO how it should look like..
This way, again IMHO, I think it will be very easy to use/understand, very effective, and best of all it totally goes with the rest of the OS's UI and it's simple; not complicated.
EDIT: I just thought of this idea too.. the pop-up menu would also have a search button too (maybe under the "All" or whatever a good name would be for that, maybe "Default"?)...
When someone presses the Search button, people then can search a name of phone number (just to see if a certain person called or no)..
Meh, I don't know if that's a good idea, but I am just throwing it out there..
Thanks, great initiative!
Some feedback:
Price (side effect) is one less contact shown.
Checkboxes are on left of Text, and it is not clear the filter means the data is either shown or omitted. The former should be followed (not sure I like this part of HIG but its HIG...), the latter must be clarified.
At least in Browser there is no icon shown in Settings.
IMO it makes sense to select them all by default, and put on top 'Show...'
[EDIT]Clarification: I did not put X in checkboxes while by default it would Show All aka Filter None[/EDIT]
Integration with local voicemail (grin) or SMS/IM/etc is missing. I don't know how to solve!
Maybe Filters should be changeable in Phone settings menu, or Settings instead of in the list. The side effect of that is at least one more user interaction, the benefit is no loss of space in list.
The applied filter should be saved (permanent), at least in the current UI incarnation. Because it is not clear the settings are temporary the user will assume they are permanent.
What does Select contact do? If that is the confirmation of the selected contact from list (IOW selecting contact in list does nothing until confirmation) this should be the bottom entry in the list of options because its related to the scroll-down list.
[EDIT]
Filtering on group/context also useful. Nimbuzz provides this, albeit is IM application[/EDIT]
One thing I like about bandora's pic is that it explains those icons to the left of calls (missed, incoming, outgoing). I never had a clue what those arrows were supposed to mean! So, having that filter screen has a secondary effect of being a help screen for the icons.
1. Something I've noticed on various phones is that some of them keep a log of only the _last_ time I phoned or was phoned by a particular contact, and some of them log every call separately.
When looking back over the log to remember when I was on the phone with people, especially when I'm billing them for it :-) it is *really useful* to have every call logged separately, instead of just keeping the last one for each contact.
That might not be so useful for seeing who called recently, but it's essential for tracking time spent on calls to people.
2. The ability to go from a contact page to the call log for *just that contact* would be great too. Same for contact groups, which would go to the call log for just members of that group.
Showing the last call time on the contact's page would be a nice optional bonus.
3. Interleaving calls with texts in a single log is good sometimes, and annoying other times.
I might be generalising too much here, but I can easily imagine using the following, for loved ones and work clients: "design your own live report" where you put together settings of what to show (from all the events the phone knows about - calls, texts, IMs, emails, voice mails) and which contacts to show it for, and that's easily accessible as an applet on the desktop and/or from a list of reports. It should not affect logging, it should filter the available logs, so you can create these custom displays when needed with existing data.
I'm not in any way suggesting that we don't want the call lists feature added into the Phone application itself but note that there is nothing to stop someone creating a separate application which watches call signals and creates a separate phone log. I am looking at doing something like that for myself to make missed call notification more obvious (I find the current notifications too easy to miss when I glance at my phone during the working day).
This seems particularly relevant for addressing jjx's suggestions for looking at logs by contact and tracking detailed call logs for clients.
Yes, I'm one of the persons to blame on this, I worked on this Call design at some point.
It certainly was a conscious design decision. What's wrong with tabs? They split the information up onto multiple pages. You cannot see the overall call history anymore. Be on the outgoing page - miss perhaps information on the incoming call tab. Be on the incoming call tab - miss or have to switch to another page to call again the person you just called. Somebody might get 8 calls from separate persons and miss the information for the 9th call? Well, scroll downwards.
So yes, tabs were evil here. If I would redo the design, I wouldn't change this.
(Well, naturally also since we didn't do tabs elsewhere, it was another argument towards not doing them here.)
simple filter by feature in the options would have been smart.
