The more I think about it, the more it bugs me. There isn't much consistency in functions such as find or touch screen actions (e.g. spiral to zoom). For example, in contacts and the media player you can start typing and it will jump to that letter or area. E.g. if I want to play Muse in my media player, I can type in M and it jumps to M. Type in Mus and it hones into Muse. Contacts are the same way.

But why can't I do this in the file manager? It would be nice if I know the name of the file to type it in and jump directly to that file. Rather than scrolling through a list of PDFs to get to the one I want.

Granted it's probably an indexing issue (seeing as how music and contacts) are indexed. But it would be nice if things like this were used across the built-in apps and operating system. For example, instead of scrolling through the applications (or even categories for apps if you install categorize or wait for the 1.2 update) I could just type in the name of the program I want once in the application listing (granted there is the terminal ).

I've long complained about the inconsistency of the UI controls, touch functionality, et al. However, that's the nature of an open source OS unfortunately... so many different ways to implement the same stuff, or just leave it out/off.

If anything, I hope that Moblin brings to the table some sorely missing UI/UX consistency to MeeGo.

I don't think we'll ever have consistency across 3rd party developed applications. And I'm fine with that (a side effect of being able to implement what you want how you want, as you mentioned).

Though it would be nice to have consistency across the applications that Nokia itself works on.

None of the applications the OP describes are open source. The application menu is open source, but is developed solely by Nokia, and they refuse patches that change UI.

That part was implicit. Even between teams on the same project, you'll have one manager that will do (say) 1-9 out of 10, leave out 8 and the other manager will incorporate 1-7 of 10, leaving out 3, 5 and 9 for instance.

Getting everybody on the same page, even within the same project is sometimes troublesome. I know I've done projects where I had to go behind each and every programmer to make sure they followed the small things - like a 4 pixel space between all buttons for instance. Some were 6, some were 4, some were 3... some just arbitrarily placed them.

And it's like that on a lot of OS's, you just hope that you're more consistent than not - some OS's get that right, a lot don't.

If Maemo was more consistent, even with the core OS, I'd probably appreciate it more. But with my last year being steeped into UI/UX, I've started to look for things like that and they tend to irk me on some days.

Other days, I know damn well the project manager standpoint and the engineer standpoint too well to even allow myself to get too upset.

Your original post though; spot on. Forgot to say so earlier.

The spiral-to-zoom working everywhere in the OS could probably help to alleviate a lot of the potential problems of Harmattan in the N900 due to the lack of multi-touch.

http://blogs.igalia.com/berto/2010/0...-and-vagalume/

One thing that is pissing me off re. consistency is that the dialog to access the advanced settings of a Wi-Fi connection is *still* like how it was in Diablo.

Let's open a wiki page listing all the sections of the OS that are not consistent?

I am an Art Direector and UI designer by profession and I have to say that my eyes bleed every time I see a standard margin missing or UI widgets misaligned. Oh and 'square' rounded corners in the popup menu of the browser - like Chinese water torture And the sudden change in UI/UX when getting into 'advanced' settings pretty much anywhere. It's like having a sports car that's been built by hand and first someone lost the ruler and then the blueprints got mysteriously burned. The car still runs OK but the doors don't close properly and the fenders are borrowed from model a few years back.

Edit -> At least it's fast

Uhh and don't look at the games, the rss reader, the backup tool, crappy notes, skatch and even the pdf reader....