[mobile ui] navigation rework

[Marco Martin]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 5:57 AM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> Sebastian and Marco (welcome to the team, btw):
>
> Awesome. The jump forward of the mobile UI is stunning. It's fun to read
> through the commits and see the two of you work together.
>
> Thanks for the time and effort spent on Subsurface-mobile this weekend!

Hi Dirk, thank you!
Just answering a couple of points.
What we are trying is to do some components, together an user
interface guideline that can be easily used by mobile QML
applications, that are easily usable both on our platform and on
Android, where it would look fairly consisten with the native material
applications, but yet with its own personality. Subsurface was a great
candidate as it was at the beginning of a QML based mobile version,
and it has been pretty fun to work on :)

Since our components and user interface guidelines are still in the
beginning, now
we also have some designers/usability people working on the design
side (will make them play with the application to see what suggestions
they may come up with), so is important to see the eventual problems
that those components and paradigms of interaction can have on a real
application, as now is the phase when there is still plenty of time to
adapt and change things since we aren't fully committed to the API
yet.

> <Unknown File>: QML StateGroup: Can't apply a state change as part of a state definition.
> qrc:////imports/org/kde/plasma/mobilecomponents/private/ActionButton.qml:52: TypeError: Cannot call method 'close' of null
> <Unknown File>: QML StateGroup: Can't apply a state change as part of a state definition.
> qrc:////imports/org/kde/plasma/mobilecomponents/private/ActionButton.qml:52: TypeError: Cannot call method 'close' of null
>
> Not sure what triggered those.

there are some coming from the components, some coming from the app,
cleaning those that are component related now.

> - dive list: the visual separation between the different dives is a bit
>   subtle, I think. Yes, there is the very faint line but to me after a bit
>   of scrolling it took my eyes a moment to settle and parse. Maybe we can
>   have alternating background colors (light blue and the current light
>   gray for example)?

or perhaps just a more visible separator. Not a big fan of the
zebra-like alternating colors, but it could be tried

> - opening the drawer: at least on the Nexus 6p with Android 6.0 it took
>   quite a bit of trial and error until I was able to open the drawer just
>   by swiping from the side. Could be a user issue. The button makes it

i seen that the edge seems to work better on some devices than the
others, it may be an issue of the touchscreen sensitive area not
stretching all the way trough the border, so maybe a bigger sensitive
area is needed (in general at least with new devices this gesture
should be usable, as material design has a similar drawer that can be
pulled from the side as well)

> - dive view navigation: I can see the logic behind a swipe from the left
>   bringing us back to the dive list, but the back button does that as
>   well. I still would much rather see swipes to the left and right bring
>   up the next and previous dive, respectively

this is one of the areas I want to get our interaction designers think
about: on one hand getting back with that gesture is really convenient
and is far easier for the "single hand" use case on a phone, but on
the other hand is very restricting on what the application can do in
its own screens, so yeah, interesting problems :)

--
Marco Martin