Improved tactile feedback with the Community SSU

The latest version of hildon-desktop features experimental support for improved tactile feedback. What this means for you is that if you enable this feature, you will "feel" app menus and dialogs appearing and disappearing, just like on some Symbian^3 devices. It's disabled by default, but you could give it a try and see if it improves your experience.

First of all, you have to install the tactile helper from Extras-Devel (Git repository here). Then, you need to edit /usr/share/hildon-desktop/transitions.ini with a text editor as root and set the value of tactilepopups to 1 (i.e. change "tactilepopups = 0" to "tactilepopups = 1"). Save the file, and the changes should be applied instantly (if you have the latest version of the CSSU installed). Yes, I know that this forks a new process every time a feedback is played, but this keeps the architecture open for experimentation and prototyping of new ideas. It also didn't noticeably hurt my N900's battery life when used for a few days.

One further improvement would be to add support for "tactile" into Hildon, so that it vibrates when you press a button, but it doesn't vibrate if you touch a non-sensitive area of the UI (because right now, it vibrates on every touch when configured to do so, and that's not really tactile feedback of UI elements - you can "feel" the screen anyway, and it doesn't matter if the device registered your touch if the touch turned out to fall into a spot where no action will be carried out). I'm not sure if Qt Mobility's Feedback API already supports controlling the N900's vibra motor, but if not, there would be another great improvement opportunity.

The tactile helper can be easily integrated in other apps, the source should be trivial to understand, and easy to utilize in third party applications. It also comes with an example ('tactile-demo.py') that you can have a look at for a more elaborate example :)

Modifying the Maemo 5 task switcher and launcher

This will be the last post for this week, I promise ;) After playing around with the MeeGo Handset launcher and task switcher, I decided to have a look at how this could be implemented in Fremantle, because the big previews and the paginated launcher are easier to use in some cases (you can also checkout the contents of a window while scrolling by without having to activate it). hildon-desktop manages the task switcher and launcher, among other things. The results of two days of hacking are two patches:

• Single- and double-column task switcher and the
• Paginated launcher icon grid

What I'm missing right now and did not succeed in implementing straight away is the "snapping" of TidyFingerScroll to page boundaries, so that whenever a scroll operation is finished, it automatically scrolls to center the icon page (for the launcher) or a preview window (for the task switcher). Obligatory demo video (.debs and patches are linked from the threads above if you want to try it out yourself) here:

If you happen to have experience in Clutter, why not give it a try? I suppose you would just need to implement another scroll mode in TidyFingerScroll and then request this mode in hd-task-navigator.c and hd-launcher-page.c. Who's up for the challenge? :)

Random observation: Hidden in hd-task-navigator.c one can find a geeky gem:

  xthumb = ythumb = 0xB002E;

A new gPodder release should be ready next week. And now back to some Uni stuff :)