Suggestion: Make keyboard easily available in "any" application
asked 2014-02-21 15:22:16 +0300
Recently there has been quite a number of request to improve applications like e.g. the people app. I'd like to suggest a usability improvement for Jolla that would alleviate most of the problems users seem to have with these applications: (just made a shitty mockup to explain the idea)
How about a global gesture (e.g. a two finger swipe from the bottom of the screen as suggested in the comments) that swipes in the on-screen keyboard in every application where something can be (textually) selected. This way it would be possible to allow a search by typed characters (could be a fuzzy search through various field or as well a prefix search). The behavior when typing could be decided upon - I could imagine narrowing the displayed results as well as jumping to the matching entry (like in Windows Explorer).
This could also be interesting for the gallery (browse for EXIF metadata or only selected tags etc.), settings app (quickly filtering it) as well as the calendar.
Due to a request I changed this post to make it easier to understand, however I'm keeping the old post here:
I particularly liked this on my N900. I could just press a keyboard key in some applications (e.g. file browser, messaging, basically anything browseable) and be able to quickly jump to the entry corresponding to the key pressed. I could imagine this working with the on-screen keyboard as well - the problem would only be that we'd have to 'waste' a globally available gesture or swipe for this (although a swipe would incur another layer of indirection but this cannot be avoided if the keyboard is not always visible). I'm maybe more used to this as I have always used my phones more like computers but imho this would improve the usability of the whole system significantly.
BlackBerry 10 uses a two finger upward swipe to show keyboard in any application. So I would say, this could be used and using the same gesture would also make it more discoverable.
MartinK ( 2014-02-22 12:59:25 +0300 )editi really love it in n900, i was using it almost all the time in multimedia player application.
poulwiel ( 2015-01-11 20:42:21 +0300 )editalso, after TOHKBD will arrive to me, it would be great if it would work just like on n900 - i really hope for this.
poulwiel ( 2015-01-11 20:44:30 +0300 )editThis would be extremely useful, when you hold the device with two hands it feels very easy to swipe up from the bottom with both thumbs, and after doing that they are already in place to start typing. This could also help with this highly-requested feature: https://together.jolla.com/question/1286/search-global/
nthn ( 2015-01-11 23:08:00 +0300 )edit