MeeGo wishlist

Because all the cool kids blog about it these days..

• Follow the FHS (get rid of workarounds such as Optification)
• Remove Maemoisms and Scratchboxisms
• Follow freedesktop.org specifications (at least bugs 657, 1303, 3817, 3818, 3828, 3822, 3913, and 4766 according to this wiki page)
• Allow many different UI toolkits and languages (it's OK if you decide to provide official support for only a few of them)
• Make sure other UI toolkits integrate nicely (mostly covered by following wm-spec, icon-naming-spec and systemtray-spec and not inventing "MeeGo"-specific technologies and non-standard implementations)
• Make sure notifications work from other toolkits (libnotify-based vs. Qt-only notification widgets)
• In general, follow the ideas from the Mainstream Linux Aligment wiki page (the page is broken atm, but you'll be able to see the bug IDs)

If any of these specifications/standards do not meet the requirements, please work with freedesktop.org or other related institutions to get your extensions discussed, fixed and then integrated into the relevant specifications.

People will still develop mobile UIs specifically for whatever device will come along in the future, but porting from/to "mainstream" Desktop Linux should be as easy as possible.

There's a lot of awesome open source Linux/UNIX (GUI) software out there, it just needs some UI love to be usable on mobile devices. Don't make it harder than it should be.

(And with that I mean that it's easier to relayout a GTK+, FLTK, wxWidgets, Swing or Tk UI than to port everything to "the one true toolkit".)

This is especially true since open source developers usually develop in their free time, and porting an app to a new toolkit/environment is something that can't be done in two afternoons. Relayouting UIs can be done in that time.

Adding paradigm-shifting cool new UIs will still work without breaking backwards-compatibility and without restricting developers to one language/toolkit.

Oh, and Mer solves most of these issues by basing itself on a "standard" Desktop distro and only changing stuff that's really necessary.

"N900" wishlist: Hardware scrollwheel

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how I would like to have a scroll wheel (like all normal computer mice have) on the right side of my N800, just below the "Nokia N800" text. This way, I could easily scroll web pages and long texts without needing to use my finger on the touchpad. Using the finger on the touchpad has several disadvantages:

1. You hide parts of the content you are reading with your finger
2. You might accidentally click a link (in the browser)
3. Scrolling through long texts means you have to sweep with your finger from the bottom of your screen to the top, several times

Apart from scrolling, this could act as a nice volume control in media players. Maybe even make the scroll wheel pressable, so we have another button (mute in media players?).

If you have an N800, please try this the next time you want to scroll a webpage: Move your finger over the top right side of your N800, between the "Nokia N800" text and the speaker holes. I don' t know if the scroll wheel would fit onto a smaller device like the N810 (or the "N900").

I think a touchscreen is nice, but having hardware buttons makes the device just easier to use in my opinion. I would even try to make touchscreen clicks by pressing the display, like it is done with the new Apple MacBook touchpads (see apple.com for videos). But there may be patent problems with that, so maybe this is the reason why we won't see that on the "N900". But think about it! Wouldn't it be nice?

That said, please also improve the D-Pad and hardware keyboard on the new hardware :)