Entropy said:
Why not a three-finger tap or swipe? Atomic Web Browser (which I recommend trying) uses those, as well as a two-finger swipe to switch tabs, and a few other gestures as well.
Possibly, but those are a little challenging because they prevent us from responding immediately to two-finger taps/swipes. The problem basically is that the three fingers aren't guaranteed to land on the display at exactly the same time; hence, you have to hold off on responding to any two-finger tap until you're sure that it's not actually a three-finger tap. You can simply wait until the fingers are lifted from the screen before processing, but we consciously decided not to do that in HWR at least since it made things feel weirdly laggy. Or you can process the gesture and then undo if that changes, but that would definitely be a bad idea with the HWR one because people would see a character getting deleted when that wasn't what they wanted to do. I can certainly see this approach making sense for less commonly used gestures, though.
Entropy said:
One other useful thing that AWB does is allow the user to see a menu every time the app is launched (so you don't have to download the previous Web session data if you don't want to.) That would be useful when launching (or un-backgrounding) the app--allow the user to go straight to a tab-bar-like menu. (AWB also allows you to specify a single action that's done automatically.)
I think we would add an option for that if we went with an "icon wall," in fact I'm not sure why we don't have an option to auto-open the tab bar on launch / resume now...
character said:
I'm not so big on Three20 - see
this blog post for some of the reasons why; I don't think we'd want to commit to weaving it into our software as closely as we'd need to to make good use of it.
radioman said:
Specifically, I think it would be useful if there is a way have a module loaded concurrently with another, so I do not have to reload the flashcard session again, or the OCR module, etc. If this is possible, here are some ideas on the interface.
Isn't that already possible? You can switch to the OCR tab when you're in the middle of a flashcard session now without exiting the session. There might occasionally be a bit of flicker / delay when switching back, but that would be because the iPhone ran low on memory and booted the background item / forced it to reload; even spinning modules off into separate apps wouldn't help on that.
radioman said:
Two Finger Swipe - takes you to the next already open application module. If you have more than one you would cycle through them - right 2 finger swipe takes you to the previously accessed module, 2 finger left swipe to the next one on the list that was not open. And if there is no other module loaded, it would take you to the icon wall.
Three Finger Swipe - Same as Two Finger Swipe, but kills the application module you are currently using.
The swipes worry me a bit because they require us to keep tabs in a certain visual order so it's clear which tab you're moving to / which direction you need to go to get to the desired tab - works a lot better on iPad where we might be able to have a persistent tab bar indicator of some kind.
radioman said:
Menu Options:
1) have an option of what modules you would want to always run and not be shut down, or
2) have an option to "prompt" the users when exiting a module.
That would be more individually module-dependent, I think, since different modules have different notions of activity - for flashcards, for example, you might want it to return to the session when you came back to the module but want it to drop out of any farther-down dictionary definition windows you'd pulled up, or you might even want to have the session running in one place but a specific card organization screen up at the same time. In flashcards we already do have a prompt like that on exiting a session - again, the notion of what we might want to prompt for varies with each.
Honestly, though, it feels like there ought to be a more intuitive way to do this - what you describe is kind of getting into WM/Android "task killer" territory; the software should be intelligent enough to figure out most of the persistence stuff on its own. If it's desirable for a module's current state to be automatically saved / brought back then it always should be. This would be another advantage to having a lot more tabs / buttons; there can be a dedicated one for flashcard sessions, e.g., so that rather than opening up the flashcard tab and not being sure whether you'd get back into a session or to a higher-level screen from which you could then resume a session or start organizing cards, you'd just tap on the icon that always took you to a flashcard session.
radioman said:
Direct access to modules via gestures - And irrespective of being able to keep modules simultaneously loaded, I would certainly be a fan of gestures to access the menu, or to directly access given modules, bypassing the menu all together.
I'm thinking primarily the menu with a few carefully-chosen gestures - if we get too gesture-happy then none of the gestures will actually work that well because it'll be too easy to trigger the wrong one / we'll have to wait too long to be sure which gesture the user picked.
radioman said:
With regard to the music thing, I do not think anyone would care if it takes 30 seconds to import lyrics.
It'd be 30 seconds to bring up the catalog, actually - the lyrics import is quick once you select the song - but I suppose in general I shouldn't be so paranoid about this. I don't want to have it feel "broken," though, and between the slow loading and the fact that so many Chinese MP3s
don't have attached lyrics I worry it'll frustrate more people than it helps.
