Improvement ideas for Sailfish UI (covers, desktops)
The pinned covers is already discussed in Here, but I included it also in my layout idea. There is a custom icon to show which apps are pinned and which are not. Pinned apps would not move and they could not be (accidentally) closed until they had been unpinned.
Second thing I would love to have are covers that are bigger than just one fourth or one ninth of the "desktop". Especially calendar or weather forecast covers would benefit from this kind of possibility. Of course it creates its own dilemmas, how to get different sized covers to work together, how to resize them etc. But I think these are just issues that could be solved.
Third thing is more than one "desktop". I would move the ambience to upper part and use the desktop part as three layer desktop. Swiping would change the desktop (1->2->3->1...) and all the desktops could run their own apps. This would reduce the need for 3x3 covers and thus calendar/whatsapp/etc would be more readable. I understand that it's against your design principles, but this is just an idea :)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15698996/sailfish_improvements.png
much easier solution, have a gesture to switch between static and dynamic home-screen - I mention this everywhere someone brings the multi desktop idea up. Static=now, dynamic=scrollable, gestures=2x2 -> pinch-to-zoom -> 3x3 -> pinch-to-zoom -> dynamic. This should be user-configurable, it is just a config file... some people may like to have a 4x4 grid and after that a dynamic mode or even a persistent dynamic-mode. I do not like to sacrifice side swipes for desktops. Like your idea for bigger covers would be pretty useless as soon as you have such info on lock-screen, calendar in events-view and static apps on side-swipes
chemist ( 2014-08-25 12:41:55 +0200 )edit