Categorised Icons

[bobsobol]

I appear to have lost the ability to have a categorised Icon view of the Application Menu, getting a sub-menu view instead.

I'm guessing this was a design decision in a recent update, and while it does navigate easier from the keyboard, it makes launching less frequently used applications (not pinned to the dock) very difficult on a touch-screen device. The uncategorised view is a massive mult-page (11 pages, on my primary system) mess of icons all thrown in together. Some of those icons (from non-curated apps, mostly) have the same image, and the same name, with a different description depending on the category they are in... All of which is lost in the uncategorised list, save for the tooltip which, again, is quite difficult to trigger in a touch-screen configuration.

I wouldn't want to take the keyboard navigation away from users who find pointing and clicking a difficult manoeuvre, or one which distracts from a primarily keyboard based operation (such as coding, or scripting) but feel that, if anything should have gone to support this, it should have been the uncategorised view. The only situation where that is useful is for very limited systems with less applications available than elementaryOS ships with. (though, selecting the categories with stodgy fingers has always been tricky, and I often wanted to be able to swipe the individual app pain up and down between categories, as well as left and right between panes of apps) Better yet, maybe the view selector should become tri-state, like the one in Pantheon files?

I didn't see any mention of this change on the elementaryOS blog, or the reasons behind it, and didn't see any other "issue" raised regarding it when searching the issue tracker. (I'm sorry if I missed anything)

[cassidyjames]

This was part of the 2.6 update from just a few days ago, which you can see here: releases/tag/2.6.0. We write about the previous month's updates each month, so we'll be writing about this on the "Hera Updates for April, 2020" blog post which will come out in late April/early May.

We did design this view to be more familiar and easier for mouse and keyboard users (by far our largest target at the moment), but I'm not seeing how it is worse for touch (other than previously-reported issues with touch in general, which we aim to fix). Could you clarify what you feel is worse about the category list compared with the old category grid for touch?

[bobsobol]

Thanks for looking at this Cassidy. I'm trying not to knee-jerk "this is different, therefore I don't like it", but I can certainly say that, at least on a touch device, I like the iOS, Android, GNOME launcher, and Windows 8 Start Screen. (that everyone hated... I'm guessing because it's different, and with mouse and keyboard it's not so great) The MacOS launcher looks like it would work too. (and then Apple didn't ever make a touch-screen Mac, so you'd have to Hackintosh it somehow)

This is about the size of my fingers on a display. (some are HiDPI, some not, and I can't run elementaryOS native on all of them, but... 8 - 13" displays, are usually portable and convenient, so...)

The above is not too bad, for easy touching, without grabbing for some form of stylus, and it still looks good on a traditional mouse and keyboard setup.

I hope you can see why the second illustration is not so great.

Additionally, fingers tend to go across the display in a diagonal, (possibly opposite directions as you switch off left and right hands, and different people have different hand-dominance) and if you imagine a line down the middle of the finger shape, I don't ever feel that confident at what point down the middle of that shape is going to touch the display first. So to touch menu items reliably, you need to have a good clear space between them. (I've seen a number of UIs attempting to do that to older applications, and I instantly know exactly why they are doing it)

I've watched ladies with long nail extensions having even more difficulty than I because they can't do the "poke it in the eye" jabbing motion I do to try to get a clean finger tip! (sorry, I'm sure there are gentlemen who like to wear nail extensions too... but I don't see it very often)

If a menu doesn't activate until pointer-up, but allows you to "rock" your finger over items until the highlighted one is selected, that helps. But you still have to be super-careful how you lift your finger, so you don't get the item next to it... Again, gutter space between means, at least you get the minor irritation of nothing, rather than the extreme frustration of an unwanted action.

Stylus make all these things much easier, but not every device supports them, some aren't much more accurate than a baby finger in your hand, and some (like those of Apple and Microsoft) are still prohibitively expensive.

I have a great respect for your UX skill, and maybe there's a better way than what others are trying, but this recent change just feels like it's ignoring the move away from the mouse as the primary analogue input device we are seeing in hardware right now. I'll admit, it is still my primary input. (or, a trackball, actually) but I am increasingly using touch devices, and I know creatives often use a graphics tablet, which is similar. (though they gain the advantage of not having a finger / stylus obscuring the thing they're interacting with, and loose the immediacy of natural interaction)

I hope that illustrates my concern?

[danirabbit]

If your fingers are that large on the display, you’re not running at a recommended resolution and you should probably expect to encounter issues.

Recommended size for tap targets is between 9-12mm. The list view items are 38pt tall or about 10mm on a 282ppi display