Standard Proposal - Exit Application

[Izomiac]

One thing to be away of is that Ctrl and Alt are common modifiers in games as well. I can think of little that would be more likely to get a poor Pandora flung against a wall than someone accidentally closing their game when they mean to crouch and shoot or something. Letters should be fine (or at least as safe as possible), but numbers and function keys are commonly used for weapon switching (a rare enough event to be dangerous)... Of course, this kinda depends on the keyboard layout as well, since such combinations might be impractical for game controls. In either case though, standardization is essential for user sanity IMHO.

 

[cb88]

tetriary termination mechanism... a very large hammer

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/16198

also remember this is a small handheld we are thumb typeing on...

keys that need to be pressed at the same time should be on oposite sides of the keyboard like alt + k or alt + del (I think those are on opposite sides don't have a pandora kbd map to verify... not that an official one is release anyway is it?)

I someone were dumb enough to throw their pandora against a wall be cause they lost a game.... well they had that coming anger doesn't pay

 

[Chip]

keys that need to be pressed at the same time should be on oposite sides of the keyboard like alt + k or alt + del
Sticky keys make this consideration unnecessary. All thumb-typeable devices use sticky keys for this exact reason. The Pandora will as well.

 

[Sphinxter]

The glory of X is we can all make it to be whatever we want.

 

[Izomiac]

The glory of X is we can all make it to be whatever we want.
True, (well, mostly, since you're a bit at the mercy of game developers). But it's still necessary to have a standard. Preferably a good one that's finalized early enough that developers don't have to check/revise their programs to accommodate it.

Another alternative might be that holding the menu button for a couple seconds kills all opened processes (or just the current one) and reopens the main menu. Or perhaps Ctrl+Menu does that and Menu alone allows you to use the menu to launch another application, like the music player. There are several possibilities.

 

[Yigguth]

I don't think there should be key combinations. Just bring up the menu and choose quit

 

[slygamer]

Of course, Microsoft and Apple employs dedicated usability experts, and probably run extensive usability tests in lab environments.

I know Microsoft does. I've visited them. An amazing amount of resources is thrown into their usability testing.

 

[efegea]

Of course, Microsoft and Apple employs dedicated usability experts, and probably run extensive usability tests in lab environments.

I know Microsoft does. I've visited them. An amazing amount of resources is thrown into their usability testing.

But they fail miserably.. Interface Hall of Shame (not only microsoft interfaces, but a lot of them..)

 

[burito]

I believe, at least from the videos that are going around, we won't have the luxury (or burden, your choice) of X11 in this instance.

The little of the system that is shown in craigix's video shows FB being loaded from a shell.

I've only compiled X11 on wintel machines, and IIRC it's typically 40-100Mb memory usage for a basic X w/ no WM, if its built from glibc at least. Certainly this will be built against busybox so hopefully it will be 10-20Mb of X, and between 2Mb (for something very lightweight like fluxbox or awm) to 100Mb+ for gnome, and you see we have a problem.

"init" is the baby that is traditionally in charge of spawning all your processes, like shells, managing "system" keystrokes (such as powerbutton, 3 finger salute, alt-f? vt switching etc.

The configuration is dependant on your particular implementation of init. I only have experience with sysvinit, which has a nice format detailed for example here....

I suspect someone is going to write a pretty menu thingy, that sits on a low-ish level api and gets spawned on a VT, much like the getty's are being spawned in the LFS example.

But back to my original reasoning, it is very unlikely (due to memory constraints) there will be X unless you explicitly put it there, so don't feel limited to gnome/kde/windoze conventions. I would encourage all to think the very strong possibility that there will be init of some description, and it may or may not be configureable easily (ubuntu for example, does not use sysvinit, it has it's own init written by canonical, of which I know SFA).

More than likely the clever boffins will make some pretty menu that is bound to a vt (with a menu button to switch to it) that lists active tasks (excluding boring things like the kernel helper tasks etc) and allows killing them there/listing things it has found pxml's for etc. Trying to put a pretty system based menu that overlays on existing apps will hurt, having them on their own screen is more reliable.


+1 for a key on top of the keyboard and one on the bottom. I was going to go for one on either side, but I thought that in the heat of gaming fingers could slip and hit the combo.

 

[efegea]

I believe, at least from the videos that are going around, we won't have the luxury (or burden, your choice) of X11 in this instance.

The little of the system that is shown in craigix's video shows FB being loaded from a shell.

I've only compiled X11 on wintel machines, and IIRC it's typically 40-100Mb memory usage for a basic X w/ no WM, if its built from glibc at least. Certainly this will be built against busybox so hopefully it will be 10-20Mb of X, and between 2Mb (for something very lightweight like fluxbox or awm) to 100Mb+ for gnome, and you see we have a problem.

"init" is the baby that is traditionally in charge of spawning all your processes, like shells, managing "system" keystrokes (such as powerbutton, 3 finger salute, alt-f? vt switching etc.

The configuration is dependant on your particular implementation of init. I only have experience with sysvinit, which has a nice format detailed for example here....

I suspect someone is going to write a pretty menu thingy, that sits on a low-ish level api and gets spawned on a VT, much like the getty's are being spawned in the LFS example.

But back to my original reasoning, it is very unlikely (due to memory constraints) there will be X unless you explicitly put it there, so don't feel limited to gnome/kde/windoze conventions. I would encourage all to think the very strong possibility that there will be init of some description, and it may or may not be configureable easily (ubuntu for example, does not use sysvinit, it has it's own init written by canonical, of which I know SFA).

More than likely the clever boffins will make some pretty menu that is bound to a vt (with a menu button to switch to it) that lists active tasks (excluding boring things like the kernel helper tasks etc) and allows killing them there/listing things it has found pxml's for etc. Trying to put a pretty system based menu that overlays on existing apps will hurt, having them on their own screen is more reliable.


+1 for a key on top of the keyboard and one on the bottom. I was going to go for one on either side, but I thought that in the heat of gaming fingers could slip and hit the combo.



It's confirmed officially that Pandora will use Kdrive, so yes, there will be X11

 

[Tor]

X11 will not be a problem. The omap X11 server runs perfectly fine on the Nokias (even the old 64MB 770), and people have even recompiled the server with rotation support and the like.

(I was running X11 and server on old 8MB i386 boxes btw. It's not the biggest resource hog on a system.)

 

[adamorjames]

Ctrl Alt Fx should not be used for virtual CLI desktops just like you wouldn't use it for virtual GUI desktops. Use screen.

backontopic:
+1000 :lol:

 

[tazg]

QUOTE

An amazing amount of resources is thrown into their usability testing.

But they fail miserably
because they think familiarity is the best usability feature. Everything they put out still feels like windows 95.