Michael,
Thanks a lot for the new version! I really like the bubble
showing the page load progress, it avoids the disturbing
page movement when the address bar disappears.
There is one big regression for me: opening a link in a new
window now requires 5 actions (long press, move finger to
select Link, release finger, look for "Open" link and move
finger there, click on Open). This is too long for the
action that I'm doing most often. The most disturbing is
the need to look for the open link. With the previous
version the open link was right next to the finger,
I could find it without thinking. Now opening a link
in a new window takes more time with Steel than with the
default browser!
I guess why you made this change: to reduce the number of
visible options in the pie chart if the "Zoom on links" is
set. But this option "Zoom on links" is now useless and
indeed you ignore it and always display the zoom options.
If you respect this option as in Steel 0.1.1, you have only
3 choices in the pie chart for normal links (as you have now
in Steel 0.1.6) and only 4 choices for image links.
I see four possible solutions:
(a) Respect the "Zoom on links" option and if it unset behave
exactly as in 0.1.1: only zooming options on long press
outside a link, only the open/copy/share options without
the extra menu indirection on long press on a link. (It
would be silly to have only one "Link" option in the pie
menu.)
(b) Supress the "Zoom on links" option and always display
the zoom options, but allow a long press on the "Link"
to open in a new window without an extra menu.
(c) As (b) but do not even force selecting the Link option:
a long press on a link, kept long pressed without moving
the finger after the pie menu appears, opens the link in
a new window.
(d) Suppress the pie chart completely, separate link actions
and zooming. For long press on a link display only the
link menu. For long press outside a link or long press
on the bubble (even if the bubble is on a link) display
zoom buttons as in the default browser. This would still
fix the most annoying feature of the default browser
(the zoom buttons popping up all the time).
My preference would be (c) because opening a link in a new
window couldn't be simpler.
The above is the only important issue I have with Steel 1.6.
Here are a few other issues.
The zoom is too fast for me. I often end up with a
ridiculously large font because I pressed a fraction of a
second too long. It is very difficult to get the desired
zoom level because you must time your finger press with very
good accuracy, and there is always some lag between the
finger press and the actual zooming (worse if the OS decides
to do garbage collection at that time, which you can't
control in Steel). The zoom speed should be at least divided
by 2, maybe more. The zoom speed of the default browser
looks roughly right to me.
The "select" option in the page menu no longer works, as
someone else already reported. (Actually I managed to
get it to work once but I can't reproduce this.)
When clicking on a link, the current page is refreshed
first: the top of the page is displayed first for a moment,
then it opens the new page. This always happens on
http://www.google.com/reader/m and sometimes on other
pages. It does not happen with the default browser. This
makes opening a new page slower than it should be
because of the extra screen refresh.
When one download finishes, it would be nice to have a Toast
indicating this. Also it would be nice to be able to open
the downloaded file from within the Downloads page, for
example to install an .apk.
The Youtube download option seems to have disappeared, on
both
www.youtube.com and
m.youtube.com. However you can get
the same effect by creating a bookmark with contents
javascript:(function(){url='
http://deturl.com/download-
video.js';document.body.appendChild(document.createElement
('script')).src=url;})();
(Bookmarklet available on
http://deturl.com. It works only on the
desktop version.)
In Find mode, changing the orientation gives
an incorrect display of the string matches.
When connecting to a site with an untrusted certificate
such as
https://wifi.free.fr it would be nice to
offer the choice of accepting the certificate (as the
default browser does) instead of just displaying
a blank screen.
The Image menu for an image without a link contains Open,
Save, Copy, Share, but only Save does something. The other
options should not be shown or should do something.
When a tag is selected in the bookmark list, the "move up"
menu option does not move the entry up, it only clears the
tag.
The page
http://www.kolbysoft.com/downloads.html is
obsolete.
> Without having an Android development kit installed,
> that's next to impossible,
It's actually very easy. Just ask people to install
the SendLog app from the market, as I do on
http://gailly.net/android/HotspotConnect.html
There are two other apps both called "Log Collector"
but I prefer SendLog.
Thanks again for Steel !
Jean-loup