Soft key positioning in 0.95

krampuls  2006/10/11 15:16 UTC


Hello,

What was the reason the soft keys were swapped in 0.95 build? It is really awkward to have positive soft key on the right on SonyEricsson while it is on the left throughout the phone UI (including network connection prompt).

Please put the soft keys back!

Thanks in advance,
Andrey

Re:Soft key positioning in 0.95

Antti  2006/10/12 11:57 UTC


Hi Andrey.

On the implementation point of view it's fairly easy for us to control the menu navigation and user interface related queries via a high level operation. What I mean by this is that we can basically swap those buttons around, so that they will appear to certain specific devices as a mirrored functionality. This approach has currently been taken on for example the SonyEricsson devices in general and also on some of the Motorola devices in trying to adapt to the native UI. To be even more clear, we have changed the softkeys from side to side.

An even more personalized approach than the current one would basically mean digging deeper into a specifying which items have to be mirrored. This would need a more structured system in general. Implementing these features on a single delivery packaging would definitely mean more application logic, hence more code and thus it would also mean an slight increase when it comes to the size of the application.

We would really like to get the user feedback and views on whether or not the menu functionality and those UI queries should be mirrorized at all on the SE devices, as this is currently the level of adaptation possible when it comes to personalizing menu positioning on the application side.

Regards,
Antti

Re:Soft key positioning in 0.95

krampuls  2006/10/23 13:27 UTC


Hello Antti,

Here is the information I am able to provide you as a mobile developer with considerable experience in porting to J2ME devices: almost all phones have positive action on left soft key, negative/back action on right soft key and left-to-right UI layout. Exceptions (right soft key is positive action) are Siemens phones (S65 for example) and Motorola phones (V300, RAZR, etc) except 3G models. I think this information will allow you to minimize your effort adopting the WidSets client to native UI of the phones.

Personally, I don't think that someone would like to swap soft keys on his phone so that it is not as in native UI, thus I don't think this toggle need to be exposed to the user.

Best regards,
Andrey