I'll have a look but won't really be participating there until the end of the coming week. Sister's wedding Sunday, then furniture in this new place... hopefully next weekend will bring some calm L)

In the meantime I'll post here when I can, but probably be reading a lot like I did before joining. I read for a week or two.

I think you are like me, in that you want and hope that the N900 can be that *almost* perfect device... There are a lot of things this phone will be capable of, and portrait mode, and capabilities of things like Skype, MSN/Yahoo/AIM etc messengers, push email, push facebook/twitter updates and so on will just make it the must-have phone. And to most it is a phone, but it seems to old-time Maemo/tablet users, it is viewed more as a computer. A miniaturized laptop, but now even smaller to smartphone size. This is going off topic so I'd better stop here.

I would think 2 ways of doing this:

- The application opens in landscape mode and then has the rotation animation. If animations are turned off, it will open in portrait orientation if it's available in the application.

-The thumbnail image on the dashboard animates and rotates around and gets bigger until it is full screen and in portrait mode.

Am I missing something? While it would be nice to have dashboard widgets in portrait mode why let that hold you back? You could do it like the iPhone where the default screen is only available in one mode (e.g. portrait) and applications can then be rotated. If you exit the application in portrait mode just have it show the dashboard in landscape mode and the user has to re-orient.

I wonder if Nokia developed any Maemo version of a sensor framework API as found on their S60 platform? Maybe it's being worked on now but won't hit until SSU #1 for Maemo 5? Who knows. http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Nokia_Sensor_APIs

As you can see from the S60 link it's still up to the application developer to support the API. I think the N900 was designed as a landscape-oriented model for obvious reasons. (not that every appreciates that facit it seems) Nokia was wise to integrate portrait mode for the phone app since pretty much anyone who's owned/used a cell phone (or cordless or landline) in their lifetime has associated with and grown accustomed to the portrait orientation. I think with the average 3 year old being able to use a PC (and probably on a landscape oriented monitor) and more cell phones in the joe-consumer market offering landscape-styled qwerty keyboards, this trend towards landscape domination is a natural design decision by Nokia.

Would I like to see the ability across the board on the N900? Sure, if it functions smoothly with practical and predicatable results, doesn't require more time and resources to develop than are available, (I'll bet Nokia has better, more useful bits of code and engineering in the works just cooking away for release to the N900 when they are ready) and it allows for customization by community developers who may be able to squeeze some advanced behavior out of it.

Does anyone know the part # for the N900's accelerometer?

Thor, I think you've missed part of the point and purpose of this thread, or my and the brainstorm's intention. We, or should I say I, don't want a "default orientation", where the OS tells us how to use it. I prefer portrait orientation most of the time, myself. I prefer one handed usage, T9, and don't like landscape's two handed requirement or the slower typing offered by QWERTY. (I know that may shock you, but T9 has been proven faster than QWERTY when used exclusively and trained well. Similar studies done by QWERTY favoring users have skewed the data, but forcing someone to use T9 for a month or two has shown that higher maximum speeds are acheiveable with T9 than QWERTY for various reasons.) The point is, just as the OS is positioned, allow the user to choose which orientation is his "default", not the OS. Let us decide how best to use Maemo, not be told.

Third party apps are a different story, and the rotation issue has already been addressed for them. Rotation is already an option for all third party apps. The biggest issue is the entire experience. I'm talking the default apps, and most importantly, the desktops and menus, which is basically what users will consider the OS in general terms, or firmware provided stuff.

Widget screens should be the most used facility of the device. To require a two handed usage paradigm to check widgets whose intended design was to save time and add convenience is counterproductive. You get an alert or wanna check your Facebook or MySpace page, you pull it out like a phone, give a look, and go! You don't stop, drop everything, grab with two hands, and then go. What good is a multitasking OS if it doesn't allow you to multitask as well? The widget screens rotating would make the N900 that much more productive a device.

There won't be a need to "reflow" any icons. The icons will stay where they are and just rotate 90 degrees on their center axis. Not sure where the "reflow" idea crept in...

Having the desktop rotate is wise. The N82's doesn't, and form factor may have been a reason to not implement it. But every subsequent high end Nokia smartphone's homescreen, menus, and entire OS UI afterwards does. It added to the convenience of the device. That's why I suggested that the N97 be the model for what we want from the N900 rotation-wise.

As for the dashboard, that won't be hard to implement. There's no need to rotate the tiles themselves in the dashboard. Rotating the device puts the tiles in the same orientation as the screen already. Now the content in those tiles may or not need to rotate. I'd prefer they did, but its not a deal breaker. No big deal in the grand scheme of things, since the user can still choose orientation for the rest of the device. On the N95, you can switch to a landscape only app from portrait mode, and the app is in landscape, forcing you to turn the device. That's as it should be.

The purpose of the dashboard is to see which apps are running and switching between them, and that shouldn't be much harder with ASR implemented. Some apps won't rotate by design, so those tiles will show a sideways view, but finding out how much resources are needed to rotate every app in its tile is something we need to find out. Most apps won't be landscape only anyway, if Nokia smartphone history is an accurate measure. I'm a longtime Symbian user, and our apps rotate well, and multitasking while switching orientations is a breeze, but they don't show in real time on the dashboard, either, so this is new territory. Maybe if resources are limited for the dashboard, you could turn off the real time view on the tiles and present an icon of a typical screenshot or splashscreen of the app, included in the app by the developer for this purpose. This won't work for IM apps, though.

To me, the N900 is a computer first. But its a pocketable computer that is capable of being a phone, and combines convenience and power unseen before. The NIT users don't understand why we want ASR because most of them don't use their devices nearly as much as smartphone users do. They don't normally go everywhere with them like smartphones, like the market, the pool, fishing, to work, in the purse, to parties and concerts, etc. They're mostly useless for web tasks without the persistent data connection.

The N900 is instantly more useful and used because of the addition of 3G, and will be in their hands much more often and in more places and situations than before, creating new use cases they've never experienced on a regular basis. So they'll be teaching the smartphone users about the OS agility while learning from the smartphone users about convenience and portability.

Laughing Man, I understand what you're saying, and that's the issue we want to avoid. The menus and desktops shouldn't be static and force you to do all of this rotating the device crap. Even cheap $320 smartphones don't have this problem. Just let the bugger rotate itself and work as the user wishes instead. That's what we have had for 3 years now on advanced smartphones, and the N900's more advanced OS should easily match that performance. We just need Nokia or the community to show it how.

A suggestion for direction of this thread, based on a post by ragnar.

His biggest concern with universal screen rotation seems to be the dashboard and the fact that not all applications support both landscape and portrait orientation. Maybe this is what discussions in this thread should primarily revolve around, at least atm? Perhaps we could base them on the questions ragnar pose?

To try and summarize:
Currently the dashboard only works in landscape mode. Furthermore, all thumbnails show applications in their landscape mode, regardless how the device is held and regardless if the application has a portrait mode or not (this appears to be how the caller application currently behaves). Something I haven't thought about before is that all applications basically are assumed to have a landscape version; link1, link2 (sidenote: universal rotation support could maybe make applications with only portrait support possible. Perhaps another reason for URS/ASR?).

Anyway, the "landscape is default-mentality" means the array of application thumbnails in the dashboard always looks good. With applications in different orientations, should the thumbnails be in different rotations as well and most importantly, how should that look?

Idea regarding dashboard and thumbnails (Is this what you proposed, Thor?):
I am thinking that if all applications continually have to have a landscape version implemented, one way would be to (like now) always display that version on the dashboard. Then all thumbnails would have the same orientation and the array wouldn't be messed up. The issue, visually, would then only be to rotate the thumbnails around their own center axis between the portrait and landscape representation of the dashboard. The contents of each thumbnail would regardless of the orientation of the dashboard be landscape versions of the app.
Pros:
* The array of thumbnails "looks good" regardless of dashboard orientation and what orientation the apps are in. No problem with different orientations of thumbnails.
* "Easy" to implement?
Cons:
* All applications have to have landscape support (as it is today)
* The thumbnail representation of the app might not have the same orientation as the application is currently running. Confusing when switching to and from such an application?
* If you have a portrait app open and go to the dashboard, that app has to rotate to landscape orientation. Vice versa when in portrait orientation and activating an app in the dashboard. The delay might be irritating. This con exists already, without rotation of the dashboard.

I think we're uncovering the reason Nokia hasn't included ASR from the jump. I'd imagine the tiles in the dashboard will show the portrait support only apps, which will come, trust me, in a sideways fashion, just like the device will show them when you hold them in landscape. This might be ugly to Nokia. Hmm...

But I don't let that stop me. I'll still git 'er done!

Also good to read what Anidel wrote about GTK.

I have. Making me have to research more crap I don't know about myself, but nothing I haven't done before. I want someone to make a portrait only app for the N900 so we can find out now how the dashboard will work. October needs to hurry up.