Is there any part of GNOME you'd like me to test on a tablet?
It occurred to me that I happen to have a development tablet that I could install GNOME on to and test software on, so I did (Fedora 17). Initial issues have been:
- no auto rotate. Perhaps my device lacks a sensor for orientation, though.
- no swipe to scroll
- no two-finger zoom or resize
- after manually rotating the screen, the touch cursor gets confused so where I touch is no longer synced up with where the cursor goes. I touch the top-left in portrait mode, and it goes to the top-left if it was in landscape.
- clicks are weird. I can successfully click many things on the interface and have them respond, but not folders in nautilus or buttons in Rhythmbox (UPDATE: sometimes they do, sometimes they don't). A USB mouse works, though.
- the on-screen keyboard will pop up when you focus a text field, but when a number of apps open, they have a text-field focused by default, resulting in the keyboard popping up, like System Settings.
- display off after N minutes doesn't actually turn off the display (like "$ xset s activate" does but just gives it a black overlay) (NEW)
- lock screen doesn't let you bring up the on-screen keyboard (I think that's fixed in a GSOC project this year though :D) (NEW)
- on-screen keyboard has no arrow-keys (so trying to use it for a terminal where you want to navigate it's history is hard) (NEW)
- the on-screen keyboard currently wants presses/mouse clicks to be exactly within a key, let alone on the right key. It would be nice if it could accept presses next to the key nearest, or even get some intelligence. (NEW)
Hey Richard, cool to see you working on this! Check out the touch support page [1], if you haven't already. There are some major areas that we're aware of, like scrolling, text selection, and the on-screen keyboard. It would be really helpful if you could see if there are any design issues which don't work with touch, such as relying on hover double-click.
ReplyDelete[1] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeOS/Design/Whiteboards/Touchscreen
No auto-rotate, no swipe to scroll, no two-finger zoom or resize aren't issues.
ReplyDeleteThe real and only issue is that no part of GNOME is better on a tablet than iOS or Android. So the issues you pointed out are really non-issues since the product, by design, isn't a good one [for this form factor].