Where are Jolla's pulley menu icons?

asked 2014-12-27 23:10:22 +0200

rdmo
3529 ●97 ●123 ●129

updated 2015-04-29 18:33:51 +0200

There is a significantly hobbling limit to the number of viable items in a pulley menu right now.

tl;dr Display icons in pulley menus. Base the menu system in limited HTML, via QML. See also: GUI improvement: pulley menu toggle gesture

Show icons on the innermost edge of the pulley menu. Use pull in-left and pull in-right to drag the activate pulley menu and include more items. A whole dropdown menu-set could fit the interface in this way. An upshot in this use case is that commonly handy OS utilities like cut, copy, paste, show-clipboard-item-list,screenshot, save-page-to-disk, monitor-DBus could be made quickly available exactly as and when they are needed. These can become almost intuitive (albeit habituated) gestures and are basically harmless as well as extremely useful.

Please fit shorter pulley text items in the same row. This wouldn't even require left-right dragging, if, like the cursor key navigation in the Firefox context menu, the pulley items would highlight consecutively (in language reading order, LTR or RTL on each row as it becomes visible) as the pull goes on. After the initiation of the pulley menu by vertical drag, however, horizontal drag selection need not be unavailable; the present condition.

Please maximise usability and empower users: add this pulley improvement in the next upgrade. Add configurability by basing the menuing system in limited HTML, it will be no slower than browsing a very short and simple web page. User experience quality ouht based on getting out of the way to the extent they only notice their interactions when the GUI interrupts their flow, rather than forcing behaviours and blocks in ways that seem arbitrary.

Firefox has this type of menu in its context menu. Pulley menus would have the icons at the (first visible) menu edge. Here's an unlike Firefox example:

The current copy-paste implementation is outside the pulley context:

...and the subsequently cleared clipboard:

A zombie clipboard typo sometimes returns (e.g. in the context of a new tab):

Indeed, the clipboard feature does appear to work in new tabs when the clipboard starts empty. In that case (as described elsewhere), a long tap on the active web address highlights the text, and copies the address to the Clipboard. An example of what to expect:

The graphic nature of the side theme changer interface (in this example limited to portrait orientation only) gives hope that this suggestion is possible:

The related QML seems to be in AmbienceGridPage.qml. Next, the icon items need identification.

There's a different kind of swiping icon on some thumbnailed apps, like the browser, in whose case users can reload the active tab or open a new tab, depending where they swipe from on the thumbnail and whether they swipe to the left or right.

The interaction in the last screenshot's context differs as image/theme selection is not available until all the theme window covers the screen. This is not the same for icons in pulley menus where part of the menu can remain hidden, so this probably affects what text to put in the QML.