Solving the cover-actions
asked 2015-09-05 18:43:49 +0200
This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >75 is welcome to improve it.
Cover actions were one of the best and most used (at least for me) features of Sailfish 1.0. The change that came in the new UI converted the gestures to buttons (and limiting them to one for official apps, but that's another story).
While I understand the need for rethinking horizontal swipes as triggers for the cover actions (it would interfere with the carousel navigation), I think that the chosen solution is worse than removing the cover actions altogether (which I'd hate to see).
I have never accidentally triggered a cover action in Sailfish 1.0, but I am constantly triggering them in 2.0.
- In the upper row of the apps, the trigger is directly below one's thumb, so you need to stretch your finger out of your comfort zone
- I am often triggering cover actions without wanting to (instead of opening apps) and I am quite an advanced user - imagine how confusing it will be for regular users
It is a big problem, so I am proposing either rethinking the trigger to something more useful and intuitive, or removing cover actions altogether. I for one will be removing cover actions from my apps, if this doesn't change before the final version of Sailfish 2.0 UI.
A call for other users - please provide possible solutions as comments to this post.
PS: I admit I am writing this a bit angry - I was trying to make a calendar event and needed to check an e-mail to find the details. When coming back from an e-mail, I accidentally hit the '+' action of the Calendar app and everything was lost.
One possible solution (not elegant, but better than the current approach) could be using double tap. One tap would change the color of the button, as an indicator for the action, while the second one would trigger it.
nodevel ( 2015-09-05 18:47:38 +0200 )editIn Sailfish OS 1 the screens are positioned vertically, in version 2 horizontally. Why not simply change the cover swipe direction from left/right to up/down?
ibins ( 2015-09-05 19:11:09 +0200 )edit@ibins because the home screen is also vertically scrollable: it's now possible to open more than 9 applications. Obviously that rarely happen due to the OOM killer, but that's for another topic... :)
g7 ( 2015-09-05 19:42:21 +0200 )edit@ibins I thought of that as well, but the problem is (actually, it is quite a nice feature) that now you can have more than 9 apps and then the list becomes scrollable and scrolling would interfere with that gesture. EDIT: Ouch, @g7 beat me by 1 minute :)
A solution could be that your up/down cover actions would be visible only if there are <=9 apps open.
nodevel ( 2015-09-05 19:44:01 +0200 )edit@ibins: impossible, the app covers are a vertically scrollable list.
@nodevel: it took some getting used to as I probably always tapped covers at the bottom, but I'm not hitting the buttons anymore after a couple of days using it now. I do agree that it's not nice that they can be accidentally selected in the first place. I bet the buttons work superb on a tablet, but on a phone they're a bit small, yet big enough to get in the way.
My proposal would be to only allow to move between home/events(/partnerspace) with swipes from the edges, then cover actions are still possible by swiping on the covers. This is how I already do it anyway.
nthn ( 2015-09-05 19:45:30 +0200 )edit