Gesture replacement

[juanobb]

Hi,

at first, sorry for my bad english, I'm from Spain and I am a big webos fan.
I think in a possibility to replace de back gesture and on this way replace de virtual gesture area. Simply We have to move our finger from de screen to botton bizel. Would be a opposite gesture of card view (from bottom bize to the screen).

In this form, We will gain more sreen space and with only two gestures, We will do all the actions.

P.S. I'm sorry again for my very bad english

[GMMan]

I see a problem with that. What if you're scrolling up a document? It's easy to drag your finger all the way to the bottom of the screen. A counter-argument can be made for scrolling up, but you don't start from the screen, so you could say there is no document under your finger. In any case, you'll probably be able to change the DPI setting to make more space if you want to.

There's also a forward gesture in webOS. What would you do with that?

[juanobb]

I don't know if it is technicaly possible. In the touchpad We can enter in the card view without gesture area. I don't if I explained well what I want to say, my propose is a "quickly" (this is important) gesture that starts at the botton of the screen and finish on the botton bizel. It is important that the Os can recognize (?) a page scroll (slowly) and my proposed back gesture (quickly)


------------
(Screen)

Gesture start
¥
-----------
¥
Gesture finish


P.S. I know, is a terrible explain

[GMMan]

Could work, though I'm not sure if there will be trouble interpreting the gesture. There could be buttons down there too, and it's quite likely for someone to swipe down while pressing the button. If you're using that area for a gesture, might as well make the entire area for gestures, since there won't be any ambiguity.

[laingman]

I always thought a back gesture on the screen would be faster than going to the gesture area at bottom. It could possibly work in browser, but in email for example one would end up trying to swipe to delete

[GMMan]

Hmm... Maybe a three finger swipe can be implemented, similar to how it works on multi-touch touchpads these days?

[Vity Traff]

Originally Posted by GMMan

Hmm... Maybe a three finger swipe can be implemented, similar to how it works on multi-touch touchpads these days?

From what I understood from an IRC discussion,Josh Palmer (who designed the virtual GA on OwebOS) thinks more gestures can be implemented (i.e 2 fings swipe...) once the multitouch tracking will be effective on OwebOS.
Here's the OwebOS settings App with the virtual gesture area:
Enyo Bootplate App
It works very nicely on the TouchPad

[juanobb]

I believe that a virtual gesture area is not a good solution and is not in order of webos Ui philosofy.
The virtual gesture area bad waste an important part of The screen Only to emulate a single gesture (back) because other gesture can be implemented without it.

P.s. Really understood anything of I wrote?

[laingman]

Multiple fingers on phone I'm sure would be worse than using the real gesture area, I think.

For one it would require two hands and more thnking.):

We need to be careful not to waste the time and resources of our tlented developers fixing something that not broke. Trying to figure out how to get the virtual keyboard not to crash in landscape would be much better project in my opinion

[GMMan]

Originally Posted by juanobb

I believe that a virtual gesture area is not a good solution and is not in order of webos Ui philosofy.
The virtual gesture area bad waste an important part of The screen Only to emulate a single gesture (back) because other gesture can be implemented without it.

P.s. Really understood anything of I wrote?

No one said that's going to be how it always will be. If we get dedicated webOS phones the gesture area will be built in. If you have problems with the screen not displaying enough, turn up the DPI. If you've seen the original Nexus port images you'll know how small the font can get.

(Anyone know whether or not Android phone ports of webOS will use the existing hardware buttons for gestures? Most (if not all) phones have a home and back button.)

Edit: Talking about hardware buttons, the original proposal would, for example on my Galaxy S2X, be unusable. I'll always be hitting one of the hardware touch buttons, and they'll always do something I don't want them to do. Plus I'll always be hitting my case. For a counter-problem, I only manage to work the gestures in Chrome half the time, since in portrait the bezel is too thin, and in landscape I'll hit the buttons most of the time.

[Buddy1969]

Well, my personal opinion is, that most of the gestures in WebOS are very much ok and very logical. "Back" and "Forward" gestures are ok for me.

What is a bit unlogical is, that after the "swipe up" to get to the app launcher, there is no "swipe down" to hide it again. Instead you need to swipe up again...
But this is about the only discepancy I can see in the gestures. But that's just my 2 cents

[Vity Traff]

Originally Posted by juanobb

I believe that a virtual gesture area is not a good solution and is not in order of webos Ui philosofy.
The virtual gesture area bad waste an important part of The screen Only to emulate a single gesture (back) because other gesture can be implemented without it.

P.s. Really understood anything of I wrote?

As you can see, I was replying to GMMan. Back to your your post, what do you mean by webOS UI philosophy? Gesture area is a wOS core feature since the start because it just make sense (think trackpad on your laptop). It just make the gestures more "natural' and accurate to have a dedicated area for that.
Did you even test the virtual area as implemented on webOS Ports? It's very thin , I dont really know how much space you'll gain there.
swipping from the screen to the bottom, for me, is way too similar to the way you pull and throw away the cards especially if you're running Luna CE with big cards. But after all webOS is open source now, you can go with your solution, the community will pick up what suit better.

[Vity Traff]

Originally Posted by laingman

Multiple fingers on phone I'm sure would be worse than using the real gesture area, I think.

For one it would require two hands and more thnking.):

We need to be careful not to waste the time and resources of our tlented developers fixing something that not broke. Trying to figure out how to get the virtual keyboard not to crash in landscape would be much better project in my opinion

The vkb doesnt crash in landscape on open webOS. And the discussion is about open webOS generally not only phones (and giving that most phones are 5"+ nowadays most users will be using two hands anyway =D )

[laingman]

Originally Posted by Vity Traff

The vkb doesnt crash in landscape on open webOS. And the discussion is about open webOS generally not only phones (and giving that most phones are 5"+ nowadays most users will be using two hands anyway =D )

OK. My bad, I thought we were talking about here and now phones.

[juanobb]

I'm not really criticizing the virtual gesture area, simply I do not like. When I say that is not in keeping with the philosophy of UI OpenWebos I want to say that WebOS try to avoid unnecessary buttons replacing them with gestures. If we put a virtual gesture area, we are putting a great virtual button, then it ceases to be useful because a virtual back button is much more comfortable (a back button on the screen as the touchpad) or directly a physical gesture area (as Palm phones). Nor do I mean to impose my idea but I think it would be important to agree on a solution over the next ports to be performed. But we can find inconsistencies or even fragmentation.

And back to my idea, I still think that a gesture down from the screen is possible. If the touchpad can do backwards without interfering with the buttons or icons at the bottom of the apps, you could do the same in reverse (quickly).
In another post it was said that it could be done laterally, from the inside of the screen to the left frame. It is a good solution that it could generalize in any direction. A gesture that is just within the screen from out of the frame. What do you think?

P.S: hieroglyphic sponsored by google translator

[GMMan]

I reiterate what I said above. The current phones that have been ported to are not bona fide webOS devices, hence no physical gesture area. If there is a real webOS phone there will be a physical gesture area.

I still see a problem with gesture anywhere. What if you're looking at a map? You could be scrolling in any direction off the edge. How about scrolling long lists? I know in Android, I have to flip through pages of posts on TweetDeck because it lacks a "top" button, and I usually flick really fast from top of the screen to the bottom and let its physics do some work. The thing is any time you're in a document you could also experience unwanted scrolling because you're beginning from a document frame. Either that or unresponsive scrolling.

[Garfonso]

The current solution is to reserve a part of the screen for gesture area. If you look at the Galaxy Nexus port that works quite well... actually the modern Android Phones are good for that approach, because they got rid of the bottom hardware buttons and replaced them with "soft buttons", i.e. a part of the screen reserved for buttons... we are doing the same, just not with buttons but with our beloved gesture area.

I don't like gesture everywhere... In fact I tried some of the more advanced gesture hacks in LunaCE and had to disable them... it was too confusing at times, when the device misinterpreted a not so clean scrolling on my part as swipe to switch app or do other fancy stuff.

Additionally, especially for mobile phones (i.e. small devices I carry around, using while walking through the city or stuff) multi touch gestures are about the worst thing to rely on. The phone has to be usable with the thumb only, so you can use it and have your other hand free for something else (for example carrying shopping bags). For a tablet this is different... but I still would refrain from requiring multi touch gestures.

[juanobb]

I found this:

Close apps easily with swiping down (You can toggle this on and off now, but will be on by default now) ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/cell-phone...-keyboard/6881 )

Is a feature of meego's update (pr 1.1). Swiping down, it closes the current aplication.

[juanobb]

I found this:

Close apps easily with swiping down, now on by default ( http://www.overclock.net/t/1163181/t...dy-to-download )

It is a feature on meego's update. Swiping down closes the current App. We can port this solution to OpenWebos.

[GMMan]

We've already got card view. Why would we want that? Plus it'll break swiping to open menus (swipe a bit off or too far and you'll close your app).