Touchscreen Compatibility [was: Feature proposal: combined system status menu]

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi Alberto,

Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org> wrote:
> > The main element of the design is to combine the sound, network,
> > bluetooth, power and user menus into a single menu. This will enable
> > us to resolve a number of UX issues we've encountered with the
> > existing design (badness on touch, difficulties having the user name
> > in the top bar, lots of complexity in some menus, like network,
> > virtually none in others, like sound...).
>
> Sorry if this goes a bit off topic,

It is a bit, so I'm moving this to a new thread. Touch compatibility
is only one of a host of drivers for this proposal.

I'll respond to your comments regarding the system status proposal
itself in the original thread.

> but, is the general policy now to
> try to optimize for touch?
>
> I am not sure what the criteria is with this regard and I might have
> miss a public discussion about it. What are we trying to accomplish
> with this whole trend towards touch? I haven't seen any successful
> single UI story that works well on both touch and mouse/keyboard form
> factors. Again, bear with me since I might have missed compelling
> discussions about this design strategy.

There has certainly been discussion in the past. We talked about it
last GUADEC during one of the BoFs, for example.

I agree that it's difficult to be completely agnostic when it comes to
input devices. That said, the number of devices shipping with touch
screens in combination with other input devices is on the increase. I
think it would be a really bad situation if people wanted to install
GNOME on their laptop, would be unable to use their touchscreen with
it.

So as an initial goal, I'm hoping that we'll be able to have a good
form of touch compatibility, with a target of laptops with
touchscreens.

I don't think we have the resources to create several versions of
GNOME for different types of devices.

> I would be more than supportive if we decided to do a tablet version
> of GNOME but I am slightly concerned that we are just blindly
> following MS/W8 and the desire of hardware manufacturers to have
> something new to ship.

To a certain extent we do have to follow hardware manufacturers - we
have no control over what they ship, and there are a lot of hybid
devices out there nowadays.

> I am also concerned about the message that this sends to application
> developers. Should they optimize their apps for touch as well? In my
> experience doing an app for a touch driven device and a kbd/pointer
> one is quite a different deal.

This is something where the nascent design patterns and accompanying
toolkit work will help - we obviously need clear guidelines for
application developers. I foresee a couple of different classes of
applications when it comes to input devices - simpler applications
which use the standard GNOME design patterns, and which aim to have a
level of touch compatibility, and more complicated applications (like
image editors, office apps, etc) which are fully targeted towards
pointer driven input.

Allan