Scrolling by tapping

[Marius Gedminas]

Once or twice I had expressed the wish to scroll a book by tapping
anywhere on the screen (being used to Weasel Reader on Palm devices).
I have now reconsidered. Tapping works fine for hyperlinks and it might
not be the best idea to make it do something else if the user misses by
a couple of pixels.

What I would like instead is to have a couple of toolbar buttons for
going to the next/previous page. When Nokia 770 sits in its flimsy
cradle it is impossible to press the hardware up/down or zoomin/zoomout
keys without making it fall out of the cradle, if you do not support it
from the other side. That's somewhat inconvenient. The toolbar, on the
other hand, has space for another four or five buttons on the big screen
of a Nokia 770.

Marius Gedminas
--
Q: What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A: A canary with the super-user password.

[Marius Gedminas]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 01:24:37PM +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> Once or twice I had expressed the wish to scroll a book by tapping
> anywhere on the screen (being used to Weasel Reader on Palm devices).
> I have now reconsidered. Tapping works fine for hyperlinks and it might
> not be the best idea to make it do something else if the user misses by
> a couple of pixels.
>
> What I would like instead is to have a couple of toolbar buttons for
> going to the next/previous page. When Nokia 770 sits in its flimsy
> cradle it is impossible to press the hardware up/down or zoomin/zoomout
> keys without making it fall out of the cradle, if you do not support it
> from the other side. That's somewhat inconvenient. The toolbar, on the
> other hand, has space for another four or five buttons on the big screen
> of a Nokia 770.

I'm attaching a patch and two icons (nextpage, prevpage) for the blueset
theme. It would probably be a bad idea to apply this patch without
drawing the icons for the rest of the themes.

Do other platforms have enough toolbar space for two new buttons and a
separator? Or would it be better to add these only for the Maemo
target?

Marius Gedminas
--
The BeOS takes the best features from the major operating systems. It's got
the power and flexibility of Unix, the interface and ease of use of the MacOS,
and Minesweeper from Windows.
-- Tyler Riti

[Marius Gedminas]

(I apologise for the excessive quoting, but the original emails were
sent quite a while back, and will undoubtely have been forgotten.)

On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 09:13:39PM +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 01:24:37PM +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> > Once or twice I had expressed the wish to scroll a book by tapping
> > anywhere on the screen (being used to Weasel Reader on Palm devices).
> > I have now reconsidered. Tapping works fine for hyperlinks and it might
> > not be the best idea to make it do something else if the user misses by
> > a couple of pixels.
> >
> > What I would like instead is to have a couple of toolbar buttons for
> > going to the next/previous page. When Nokia 770 sits in its flimsy
> > cradle it is impossible to press the hardware up/down or zoomin/zoomout
> > keys without making it fall out of the cradle, if you do not support it
> > from the other side. That's somewhat inconvenient. The toolbar, on the
> > other hand, has space for another four or five buttons on the big screen
> > of a Nokia 770.
>
> I'm attaching a patch and two icons (nextpage, prevpage) for the blueset
> theme. It would probably be a bad idea to apply this patch without
> drawing the icons for the rest of the themes.

I've been using my patched FBReader ever since, and I have to say that
prev/next page toolbar buttons are definitely very useful (for me, at
least). They are too small for my fingers, and the native finger tap
scrolling is just too insensitive. I find that I still miss Weasel
Reader's tap-to-scroll.

You can find the patch, the compiled package, and a few other things
here: http://mg.pov.lt/fbreader/

> Do other platforms have enough toolbar space for two new buttons and a
> separator? Or would it be better to add these only for the Maemo
> target?

I offer to make the missing icons if you're interested in merging my
patch.

Marius Gedminas
--
"All programs evolve until they can send email."
-- Richard Letts
"Except Microsoft Exchange."
-- Art
(found on the Snort web site)