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benny1967 is offline benny1967
2009-12-12 , 17:52
Posts: 3,790 | Thanked: 5,718 times | Joined on Mar 2006 @ Vienna, Austria
#1
Talking about the platform and its UI (not about missing features such as MMS and such), I'm very surprised that most of what looked plain wrong to me from the first sreenshots and videos I saw is, in fact, pleasant to use.

Yes, Maemo 5 is strange in each and every way you can think of, but then... even Nokia says it's rough on the edges and dangerous. And strange doesn't necessarily mean bad. It's just not as cute and friendly as Diablo was.

There's only three things that start to really annoy me now that I've used the N900 for a week:
  • Lack of consistent full screen toggle throughout the platform. If a developer decides his app will not support full screen (or will only run in full screen) and therefore doesn't provide controls to change the mode, you're lost. I'm hating this in the media player and in Modest.
  • Scrolling. I hate that I cannot scroll faster or at least without touching the screen. Why can't the arrow keys let me navigate through the installed applications when I'm in this menu? Why can't I have a scrollbar or a keyboard shortcut to quickly scroll through long lists? Having 5 seasons of your favorite TV show on the device and scrolling through all of them in the media player is a PITA... not only, but also because every now and then your touch will accidentally open a random video.
  • Consistent word completion and a better way of indicating which mode the keyboard is in. As it is now, there's no word completion at all when you're in the browser... and I'm always in the browser. It's the one app I spend 80% of my time with. Also, no matter what application you use, you cannot tell if Shift/Fn are activated (or even locked), nor can you tell which language/dictionary you're currently using. I find myself switching to the onscreen keyboard only because of this, even though typing is much easier on the real keyboard.

The "half" in the thread title is one thing I'm not sure about yet: I still find navigating through 4 desktops, an application switcher (dashboard) and two levels of an application menu frustrating and confusing. I still have these moments of "Why is this here now? Why am I here? Where's what I really wanted?". It's far less annoying than I thought it would be, but I believe it can be improved. OTOH, I guess this is something I'll get used to, so I don't count it as a full issue.
 

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Crashdamage is offline Crashdamage
2009-12-12 , 18:10
Posts: 670 | Thanked: 747 times | Joined on Aug 2009 @ Kansas City, Missouri, USA
#2
Keep in mind my comments are from the perspective of a user coming from a G1 w/Android 1.6...

Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
Lack of consistent full screen toggle throughout the platform. If a developer decides his app will not support full screen (or will only run in full screen) and therefore doesn't provide controls to change the mode, you're lost. I'm hating this in the media player and in Modest.
Hasn't been a problem for me. And I think the UIs for the Media player and Modest are just about right.

Scrolling. I hate that I cannot scroll faster or at least without touching the screen. Why can't the arrow keys let me navigate through the installed applications when I'm in this menu? Why can't I have a scrollbar or a keyboard shortcut to quickly scroll through long lists? Having 5 seasons of your favorite TV show on the device and scrolling through all of them in the media player is a PITA... not only, but also because every now and then your touch will accidentally open a random video.
I can pretty much agree here. But scrolling on my G1 was not much if any, better.

I still find navigating through 4 desktops, an application switcher (dashboard) and two levels of an application menu frustrating and confusing. I still have these moments of "Why is this here now? Why am I here? Where's what I really wanted?". It's far less annoying than I thought it would be, but I believe it can be improved. OTOH, I guess this is something I'll get used to, so I don't count it as a full issue.
Coming from Android, I'm used to this. I've found the multiple screens, dashboard and task switcher to be very easy to get used to, fast and intuitive to use. I can really fly around the N900 much better than I could my G1, even after a lot of effort customizing the G1's UI.

To each his own...but overall I think the Maemo 5 UI rocks!
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TA-t3 is offline TA-t3
2009-12-14 , 10:54
Posts: 3,841 | Thanked: 1,079 times | Joined on Nov 2006
#3
I'm mostly in agreement with benny1967, but I think I manage it - it doesn't kill me. What I'm currently most troubled by is a side-effect of the fact that the I/F has gone from an applet-based I/F to an application-based I/F. I miss the screen of my OS2007 display: I see job mail state, the private gmail state (gmail notifier), the rss one-liners, the gtalk state of my list of 5 folks to follow. All in one display. I've been looking for a way to set up one of the 'desktops' to do the same, but it gets very crude.

As for the I/F itself - again (as with some Nokia apps in the old OS, not so much with 3party apps) there are apps that won't let me resize them. The 'events' application (or what it's called) is huge. And I have a window taking some 30% of the display which tells me I have 'No new messages'. It doesn't help that it's transparent, why am I not allowed to resize it? Or rather, why does the UI allow the programmer to forbid me resizing it?
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Helmuth is offline Helmuth
2009-12-14 , 15:05
Posts: 1,259 | Thanked: 1,341 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Germany
#4
Originally Posted by benny1967 View Post
  • Scrolling.
In this point I agree with you. With everything else I can live with. But with a long list of Movies or Images it is a pain to scroll to the end of a long list!
 

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fpp is offline fpp
2009-12-14 , 20:04
Posts: 2,853 | Thanked: 968 times | Joined on Nov 2005
#5
I also agree, but actually it only boils down to one issue, not three or more : just consistency.

Consistency in how you handle fullscreen, in how take advantage of a physical keyboard (and hardware buttons!), in how you provide word completion...

There are quite a few more consistency gaps in this early version of Fremantle, it feels like a schizophrenic brat who can't decide who he really wants to be. Or rather, it feels like it was designed by committee, with each subcommittee implementing its own conventions.

The worst offenders I've found so far are MicroB itself, with its maddening and dysfunctional idiosyncrasies, and Ovi Maps, with its UI that is almost, but not quite, anything else in Maemo5...
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