Handful of Nothing

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 =)