Documentation/Maemo 5 Developer Guide/Porting Software/Redesigning From Maemo 4 to Maemo 5

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Redesigning From Maemo 4 to Maemo 5

This chapter instructs how to re-design a Maemo 4 application to Maemo 5, i.e. the Hildon 2.2 UI Style. The Modest email client is used as the example application.

Overall Guidelines

Compared to Maemo 4, the Hildon 2.2 UI Style in Maemo 5 is much more optimized for finger usage in small mobile device displays.

When the focus in design moves from stylus oriented user interface (UI) to finger optimized user interface, the reduction of the amount of visible elements in the UI becomes first priority. This means that unlike typical desktop applications, most of the functionality is not provided in a single view, but instead there are more views and each view is optimized for a single use case only. This is similar to the UNIX philosophy – “do one thing and do it well".

The major changes in the Hildon 2.2 UI Style include larger size for UI elements, removal of focus (particularly in lists), no dimming of buttons, limit of 10 items in view menus, removal of tabs in dialogs and lesser importance of toolbars and context sensitive menus.

Larger size of UI elements

By default, the UI elements in Maemo 5 should be designed as “Finger size”. This means that on average, a view can contain fewer visible UI elements. To compensate this, views and dialogs can be designed to support panning, allowing for larger amount of UI elements in total. However, panning is not an ideal design solution for all use cases.

Removal of focus

While in Maemo 4, the application menu and the toolbars often relied on focused/selected item or items as the target of a command, in Maemo 5 there is no focus. This also means that keyboard navigation is not supported in the UI in general.

In Maemo 5, the design should follow one of two possible UI flows:

  • User navigates multiple views from a list or a grid of items to a view with single item. Commands that operate on that single item can be provided in that last view (typically via View menu or Toolbar)
  • After user has activated a command, a separate item selection view is used (typically Edit Mode view)

No dimming

Instead of dimming (buttons, menu items ...), the UI elements should be simply hidden away, when they are not active. There are some corner cases where hiding would break the UI flow. For example Edit mode view toolbar simply shows the action button as always active, even though nothing happens, when nothing is selected, if the button is pressed.

Limit of 10 items in the view menus

The Maemo 4 application menu typically contains most or the full set of functionality of the application, organized in hierarchical menus. In Maemo 5, there is a strict limit of maximum 10 items in a view menu, and there is no menu hierarchy.

The Maemo 5 View menus are not application menus, in the sense that a view menu only contains commands relevant to that particular view. The only exception to this is the Root view menu, which additionally contains menu item(s) for application settings.

Removal of tabs in dialogs

When designing dialogs in Maemo 5, the tabs of a Maemo 4 dialog are merged to a single tab-less dialog with the whole content area of the dialog being pannable. In practice this results in user panning the dialog instead of switching between tabs.

If additional semantic grouping is needed for UI elements within the dialog, then group titles can be used by utilizing GtkFrame.

Fewer toolbars and context sensitive menus

With the removal of focus from default lists and grids, the UI designs for Maemo 5 typically do not include toolbars for views that contain multiple items. Toolbars are still used in views where only a single item is being shown.

The main use cases for context sensitive menus in Maemo 5 are only:

  • To show commands that operate on a single list/grid item
  • To show commands related to an item inside content, for example a web link.

Note that the context sensitive menus should only include commands that are not available elsewhere in the user interface.

Re-design of Modest email

The following paragraphs describe the overall changes made to the Modest email client when re-designing it from Maemo 4 to Maemo 5.

Task views

In Maemo 4, the Modest had three views: Main view, Viewer view and Editor view. In Maemo 5, the Main view was divided into more focused views, which allowed to get rid of the split view as well. The new five views are: Accounts view, Folders view, Messages view, Viewer view and Editor view.

IMG Figure 1: Email UI Flow in Maemo 4 and Maemo 5

While in Maemo 4 the different views are separate windows (and visible as such when switching between tasks), in Maemo 5 the views are designed as a “stack”, i.e. only one of the views is ever visible at any one time.

The Maemo 5 approach allows the design to avoid many concurrency problems caused by changes happening in several windows at the same time. On the other hand the design forces the views to be always closable. This means for example that in Maemo 5, the Editor view always automatically saves as draft, without further confirmation, when that view is closed.

The UI flow of Modest in Maemo 5 follows the “drilling down” UI flow – Initially the most generic view is shown (Accounts) from which more detailed views can be reached (ending up in Viewer). The Editor view is not directly part of this flow, but instead can be accessed from any of the other views. Going

back from Editor view shows the previous view of the “stack”, i.e. the view from which the user opened the Editor view.

Accounts view

The design of this view is simply to list the accounts use has set up on the device. Tapping on any of the accounts opens Folders view of that account. In addition to the account name, also the time stamp of the last account refresh is shown on each list item. The first item in the list is “New message” button, which is a convenience shortcut to quick write a new email in the Editor view.