So, today at #maemo a lot was talked about these “kinetic” or inertial scroll, but agreeing with someone’s point I said the following:
We should not just simple try to copy Iphone or other device interaction. It’s all about doing it, testing it for our devices, improving where it needs to be improved and the most important: trying to add more and more usability and meaning to that.
Agreeing also with Nikoo (from the comments) that we need more than just the scroll. The iphone actually did the second step for the alphabetical lists (has a letter indicator on the right) from where you can browse faster on your list. But what about the other steps? Or when the list is not alphabetically ordered? Or when you reach the end and you want to come back to the top?
Anyone who bought an Ipod and loaded it with some 10.000 songs must have been felling a little bit anxious about having to slide the finger across the virtual wheel for a lot of time. And to come back… slide again in the opposite direction.
For Canola, the good thing is : the inertial, or kinetic scroll frees a little bit the area where it used to be the scrollbar so a smart “scrolling” indicator can be placed there, that could also provide “jumps” in the whole list. I think that a combination of being able to jump across the list, use the finger scrolling and also to have the ability to hold down while scrolling (as a regular scrollbar) will be the best solution. With that we will not need to use dirt hacks (the key + arrow) used in the first versions of canola.
So I think this should be even more our way into making maemo a better “place” to learn, to improve, adapt, test and discard when not neeed Instead of just copying for the eye candy fans.
While being at INdT I never thought it would be so hard to find a Symbian developer here in Brazil. It’s quite complicated and also sad to realize the lack of this competence in such a big country like Brazil. I do know about some guys at palmsoft that develop some games but I tend to respect the game developer choice and don’t like to bother them with non-game development jobs.
So, if you know a good symbian developer here in Brazil.. let me know!
I read at a maemo user’s blog that we were wrong on jumping from toolkit to toolkit, or it was not about using the last shinny thing, but this video is an example of what We here at INdT were looking for when we dropped SDL and needed to choose a real toolkit / canvas / scene controller.
The Kinetic scrolling (as made famous by the Iphone Ugh)
The result of Kenneth’s work in a video made by himself
This is nothing new (specially with the Iphone released) but the point of the video is show the quality and speed of our choice. I asked kenneth in the morning and at the end of the day we had not only a full working scrolling, with all the motion details but also working with all kind of lists. AND FAST. and the best : usable on the current n800 hardware. Of course there’s small issues like if you drag too fast release the finger and touch it to fast before lifting up, but this will be solved.
the best part : EDJE and Python. yes this is speed for us (the UI team) to experiment like crazy and deliver some nice experiments.
I’m fully aware of our lack of the “touchpad like” sensor that the iPhone has, that gives it the ability to have this slide the finger gesture with less effort but I’m so glad to see that the touchscreen in the N800 is up to the task. We were pretty sad on the time of the first canola mockup on the 770, because it was needed so much more effort that made this scrolling boring. I remember one of our developers (Edgar) asking for this scroll, but he was the one who said (well to make so much effort just to scroll my music sucks, it should be more precise in the future) and now we have it.
Why imitate the iPhone? (is it?)
Actually is not imitating. Once you have a touchscreen good enough that’s the natural way to do it. We’ll now run into a lot of issues like that, that could also be directed to a lot of projects around the world: “Why gnome imitated this, Why KDE imitated that?, Why those guys placed this at the same pace”? But the whole point is : Scrollbars on most of touchscreen based devices SUCK. HARD.
To be a little bit more honest, scrollbars suck almost everywhere. In your desktop the mouse wheel is becoming more and more the choice for scrolling, on mobile devices a dedicated scrolling wheel also is pretty welcome. On touchscreen you have this “kinetic” to help a little bit.
But why does it suck? For sure there are a lot of deeper studies about it, but for me 2 reasons are enough to hate it: 1st. because most of the time they are small. (look at the palm, maemo, even some other cellphones). Hard to hit, sometimes hard to control (too much content and the knob goes too small) 2nd the worse: you lose space, not much but a precious one.
What if someone decides to test it bigger, ready for the finger? (like us in the first canola): We lost so much space using this, and not only space but the need of having the thing drawn there in the corner just like a convencional desktop is a drag. We want to get rid of arrows! that’s our goal. A arrow free interface. You act, the UI reacts, you learn.
Again: Scrollbars on touchscreen? No thanks. (if possible of course)
Conclusion
Like the keyboard, I think the scrolling can also be improved a lot, and maybe become a good default components for those interested in rich UI. I hope we are at INdT could be able to improve it a lot and release as a component for other evas based application in the maemo.
Source code: Just like the keyboard(released by gustavo) I think kenneth will release the sources python and edje for this =)
A update to this post:
* video now on youtube!
These mockups (in the video) are experimental. So forgive us for the typos, and even items with wrong icons etc. The information architecture, icons and final visuals will be done still.
I know it has been a long time since my last canola dev post, but I think things are starting to born here. So answering simple question :
1) Why is it taking so long for a new release?
A: Well, we kind of reach a good point with the latest release of Canola, but there was already a lot of mistakes that should be fixed. To only improve on the existing software leaving those errors behind would be a killer in the mid term, so our decision was to almost recreate the whole ui, even the components used for that.
2) Why EVAS (EFL) ?
A: I will not enter the technical aspects here but more the UI design aspects : SDL development of our designs was too slow and to restricted in a sense that we could not experiment too much (takes too much time) and we should try to hit the jackpot in just one attempt. EVAS, or more specifically EDJE gave us the ability that we need in a already proven to work way, as known in the enlightenment project. Many can say the opposite or be against this choice but for us was pretty logical to go this way, and we already have done a lot of contributions to the official project to make it run greater on 16bit based systems like the N800. To know more about it at INdT, check out Gustavo’s blog [1]
3) I saw a new keyboard on someone’s website? Why keep changing everything that’s already in maemo? Is this going to be on Canola?
A: While we do like the platform where we build on top of it, we need a little bit more freedom and also we think that the beauty of this open platform is the ability to improve what you may think is not working correctly. We used the iPhone visual of course to bring the attention to it, but our goal is of course to experiment alternative ways of inputing text without having to use a fullscreen (really fullscreen) keyboard that actually kills the context where you were typing, and also use “enter” as web page enter! submitting when you hit it. I understand the decisions behind it but I just do not agree (at the moment, who knows the future). Yes this will be on canola. I know we will face a lot of opposition agains having a third / or different keyboard, but we will do the best for our task cases. We will provide the users the best way possible to accomplish the task. So if we think looking at the web page while typing something is important at least to remember whether you are typing on the correct field, or just to keep the context clearer on user’s perception. But of course: it will not look like that, and if apple’s expanded patent covert that “expanded” key on the keyboard we may use a simple tooltip [see the green image] approach ( hehehe, it’s not expanding sir)
4) You talked about Carman integration at bossa conference
The changes
a: Yes, and it’s true. Actually Carman is also changing to adapt itself to Canola, but you will be able to choose if you want or not this kind of functionality. We will not push this for everyone. The question now is whether should we really change Canola a little bit more to adapt to the car or really go contextual and let the ui adapt itself in different environments?
We have been working hard to solve most of previous mistake with good scalable solutions, and I will share some of these with you. Maybe they will change before the release, but at least show a little bit of our approach and the path canola is going.
We didn’t have a configuration inside Canola, part because of resources, part of keyboard / input now we have it. We didn’t have a good way of letting the user enter data that was not a completely different experience, so I cannot guarantee that everything is going to change, but our plan is to fully replace the web based configuration, and let it maybe exist just to be able to open on your desktop. So more than just the keyboard we also need some ui components like sliders, etc to replace combo box and other desktop like elements.
Main ( home ) Menu & Submenus
The paper prototype for the new home - main menu screen
The solution for the home was quite a hack to fulfill one requirement of ” shortening ” the path to the now playing screen. Now things have become a little bit more complex, and a better solution was needed. So for now even having other options we went with a grid approach, that once you slide it opens the full range of sub-menu options in a iconic-graphical way instead of text. This is already working quite well with Evas and EDJE and we are going to experiment even more on the next iterations
. So.. here’s a sneak peak in some of our experiments for the home screen, already working!
click here to download full (800×480) | smaller or try to watch here :
or
OBS: this is a video for the UI mockup, but it’s already working pretty good on the device using EVAS and EDJE. This is great news because it’s almost a “theme” so transitions / effects are being worked in such a great speed and we are able to improve it a lot more than in the past.
OBS2: this is under heavy studies / work so please don’t expect this to come out as it is today =)
UI “navigation” elements
Now the goal for the basic ui is to kill all the arrows, bringing back the code from the first canola internal demo (yes the kinetic scrolling, now made famous by the iPhone). once we have it working perfect we will enable it and try to kill all arrows and scroll bars that are boring and space consuming. As I talked in the lists way before the iphone even be announced, we tried to do it on the 770 but the touchscreen sensitivity was a show stopper, making it more an exercise than a user interaction.
Now a little bit from the project itself : Python
A sure thing is : as Konttori has showed, python gives you power to develop good software in a fast amount of time. His media player is a wonderful demonstration of python power and now it’s time for INdT, after porting the python to also make advantage of the great speed up. Porting Canola takes a lot of time, but once is fully done we will be able to delivery improvements in much better way, that was a little bit more painful to do with the fully C based canola. Along with Evas, and the python bindings provided by gustavo I think we already have a very nice option for rich ui.
and also of course : Future?
We are in the middle of the work, and we are already thinking on the future. How to really make a jump from what we have today to things really advanced? Our hardware is quite nice, but for example the tearing in the previous version of n800 were almost a show stopper. We expect to be able to squeeze a lot of juice from the n800 still, but it seems that will be complicated to keep it working on the 770 for the future. So forgive us a little bit if things are not quite good on the 770, we will do our best, but we will try to focus ahead not behind when thinking about the interactions.
Finally…
Across the week I will try to post / talk more about the small challengers that are appearing and how we are planning / designing the solution for them, like the multi-tasking / alt - tab interaction, the thumbnails and advanced transitions, the options keys that took the “confirm” key place and also more decisions on the list with gestures and other hidden features.
So please keep a eye on INdT’s work to improve Canola… you can follow our work by our blogs [(link in the end) , and we are working hard to put a central feed ( like a planet ) and a better website with all the info people could search for about the projects that we are running here.
Osvaldo provided the “planet” pipes, to access all INdT’s blogs click here
I was talking since the announcement of the iPhone here in my office that Apple for sure wasn’t thinking about making money only with the devices. It was obvious that they would want more control and profit also on the network level. My surprise was that they actually did it. So is the design, even with so much problems, so powerful that can make companies known for the hard business model to change it’s opinion like this?
Anyone in contact with carriers knows that when it comes to money, specially revenue share they are quite hard to deal, and to be honest I think no one in the industry believed that someone could do what apple did with AT&T.
So after reading some websites “talking about it” I could actually be sure that apple does charge the operator for a share of each customer’s money when Brazilian Carrier director said said that the Apple business model is not suitable for Brazil:
“Eles querem compartilhar receitas, mas por que eu vou compartilhar minhas receitas (de serviços) com uma empresa que só vende a infra-estrutura (aparelho)?”,
In a cheap translation, it would be something like :
“They want to share the revenues, but why would we share our revenues in the services with a company that is only selling the hardware / infrastructure (the device itself) ?”
So, now its time to wait for 2 things in the iPhone world :
1) See who’s going to joing the AT&T bandwagon of slavery to apple
2) Wait for the confirmation of the cheaper iphone, dubbed the iphone nano.
So you can run across lots of articles saying that Apple is going to rule it all, that the iPhone is going to bring down the big names, among other things. I really tought that I was a apple fan boy, or at least someone who likes apple enough to sometimes be blind, but… come on.. just sometimes. Most of the time not only me but any reasonable people can see the basics, already written here in this blog : Apple is going to push the industry quality, but not rule it. Simple enough.
It’s sad to see people thinking that Nokia, Samsung, motorola, etc are stupid companies and that they will just try to mimic the iPhone to fight against it, and that apple’s arsenal of media control (itunes - osx - devices ) can be the lethal enough.
Sorry fan boys, it’s not now that Apple will win. Come on! Apple had the best hardware, the best OS for the end user and never got it. Apple released a breakthrough PDA (the newton) and failed beautifully. Apple still having just a niche of the computer market. Of course Apple managed to create the ipod, and dominate the media player market but the iPhone will have a much more complicated scenario and will not in the next 5 years be a real player in the market. It’s segmentation, like the laptops, like the desktops will remain on the phone area and the most important markets will never be reached with it. The ipod almost created a market, the iPhone is entering a solid market that needed a little shake. The market thanks apple, but do not fear it.
Sorry again fan boys, but Apple is not bullet proof.
I’m out for 2 weeks relaxing a little bit after a years of sequential projects. It’s great to spend a little time in the nature, and best of all with my family that I haven’t been able to meet in the past 5 years.
So, after the iPhone launch, I got to talk to a great friend in NY that of course bought it without lines and etc and he, an apple fan said me that following :
“the iphone is incredible, but too restricted. It cannot replace my phone, the blackberry. I need to to everything with iphoto / itunes and that’s very, very annoying, and also a lot of details like not being able to copy and paste, no flash, inconsistency in gestures etc are in the way”
But we came to the conclusion that this is more a Time to market issue that others, and that they are likely to be slowly improved with updates, using itunes.
Enough on the iPhone, now is time to study all it’s flaw (I’ve been collection the most that I can from my friends because you cannot use the iphone outside the US (yet) and of course all of it’s great things that are for sure to be taken into account when designing a new product.
