Iamundernodisguise~

Let me start with two facts: First, being able to do anything on S60v5 using only the touchscreen except entering the main menu is annoying. Second, finding a wallpaper that has the proper amount of er… top padding (245px!) so that important parts of it won’t get obscured by the shortcut bar is kinda hard!

First issue is solved by adding a main menu icon to the shortcut bar in active standby. I’m not the only one that does that, pretty much any desktop thread on mobile phone forums will have something like that. That brings you the second issue. Say you’re in a huge SVIIB mood lately and you’ve found this totally sweet promo pic of them. But when setting it as your wallpaper, the icons obscure their heads. That’s clearly no good!

The solution I’ve found (at least I’ve never heard about it being done before) is to simply add an application with a transparent icon in those slots. So there I went, fired up my html editor and made a simple WRT widget, if you open it, you get a black screen, tap it (or the softkeys) to close it.

• blank.wgz

Throw it on a obscure menu folder, and just pretend there are no icons on those places. :P It doesn’t solve the dotted line problem, but that’s a theme thing, so no easy way to edit it. If you only have one icon there you win 280x100px of screen real estate to display your wallpaper!

And for the obligatory rant at Nokia paragraph: None of this would be needed if they’d let you keep empty slots. Or even better, port the 5530/5230/every other S60v5 phone’s homescreen to the 5800! The fixed Contacts and Dialpad icons are ridiculous! Some 5800 love please. :P

Update: So I was playing with a Nokia X6 on RDA today and decided to try this there too, disable all homescreen plugins but the shortcuts one.

DEFINITELY CLASSIER YOU GUYS

Srsly Nokia, give us the new homescreen! D:

rly

Splitting the updates I was adding in the ActiveFile post to a new one, just to be tidy.

“Oh, by the way, my 5800′s earpiece finally gave up, am taking it to be replaced tomorrow. So back to the N95 for a while. Dunno if that’ll affect the frequency (LOL) of posts here, but just giving a heads up. Hey that was easy, replaced on the spot. And maybe it’s just my impressions, but I swear the new 5800 is a little more… solid, or something.”

Hacking most certainly got easy lately, getting a certificate is totally automated, and with it, installing HelloOX2 is a doddle.

Searching the installers to get my phone set up again, here are the things I noticed:

• There’s no easy way to get the freeware epocware Zip Manager that was available in the Download! app, leaving you with no easily available Zip app. Wtf? I found a repack of it with updated Ovi style icons on Opda though, so it’s all good.
• Getting mobbler I noticed that on the 20th, Nokia released a couple more APIs for S60v5, so scrobbling might be possible on the next version.
• Got a new (at least for me lol) Putty version, with touch support too, which is nice.

And the big news for today is, of course, the official announcement of the N900. I’ve been a loyal Symbian/S60 user for… 4 years already? But… wow.

I can’t understate it, this is huge. The new UI (Panorama desktops, task switcher with live previews), the default applications (Mozilla browser, Conversations), the hardware specs (Cortex A8 + max 1gb of ram), I could go on… Seriously, take a look at that site, watch the videos. So awesome.

From CJ’s E75 review, comes screenshots of the second S60 phone in the market with Ovi icons, and guess what? It does have a GPS folder that’s not an application and has the Maps app inside of it!

It doesn’t have the Positioning Settings icon, however, but I’m sure doing an app that’s simply a shortcut to the appropriate pane in the Settings app would be a doddle (pheer my brit. informal skills). So pleeeeease Nokia! :P

So with a less than official v5 Sports Tracker out, I finally gave in and made a GPS folder. As we still don’t have a MenuEditor for V5, or a suitable .mif file with cool icons, it looks like the standard new folder icon. (example.)

But I noticed that the “Location” application, simply links to other applications. You can notice the “link” because of the screen flash you see, that doesn’t happen when switching views inside an app. It links to the known Landmarks and GPS data apps, and the positioning pane in the settings app (let’s ignore that the positioning settings’ icon is the same as landmarks’, it’ll probably get changed for a “map with wrench” icon soon enough).

So, what’s the use of making it an app? A folder with those icons would be much nicer, as it would give people like me an opportunity to customize it, and it wouldn’t be any different for people that don’t mess with the original menu layout (therefore, saying this is anti-clutter is not an answer)

If it was a folder, it would give me a nice link, and stop me from having two levels of GPS-related apps.

I think the reason behind it is political, people often complained about S60′s menu having too many icons and being too cluttered (fools!). S60 just clumped stuff together in apps, as if they left it in folders the licensees could (and would) mess with them. (*cough* Nokia and Samsung *cough*)

I say this approach kinda worked on the communication apps (bluetooth, usb, etc) as those had redundant panes on the Settings app. I still think they should have gone the other way around, dumping every communication related app from the settings app and having a separate “Comm. Settings” app, but, oh well.

But it wasn’t well realized on the GPS-related apps, as there is still a redundant Positioning Settings pane in the settings app (Settings>Phone>App. Sett. > Positioning). Plus the two level thing if you wanna have everything related in the same folder (like me).

Changing this would be incredibly easy (literally just adding a folder + icon and editing those apps so they show in the main menu), but it’s the kind of thing I don’t expect to see changed in a while. Maybe once the first Symbian Foundation powered UIs come along, but I bet Nokia has bigger things to worry about than menu organization.

btw, lol @ me for writing ~400 words about folders, again.

Let me start by saying this: The rss reader in the s60 browser isn’t useful, but it has potential.Now that I got your attention, let me explain why I think that, in this post I’ll use one of my favorite tech blogs to test, engadget, let’s see howthe engadget feed looks like in the rss reader:

Not very useful right? lol

This the two mistakes S60 browser team made in designing the rss reader:

• Huge font
• Huge images

The first thing can be solved by a hack made by the symbian freaks at symbian-freak.com.
This changes the reader template to adjust the fonts sizes, let’s see how engadget looks on this modified reader:

Still huge images but a sensible text size, much more easy to read.

But how to solve it? Does some kind of special resize image function need to be created? No, this is already built in s60′s browser core, look at this screenshot I took of the main engadget page set to 50% zoom:

Sensible pic size, excellent text size (a matter of opinion, I understand that some users may think of this as too small), really much more information fits in the screen at the same time. I should just go to the page instead of using rss, right? Wrong, if I do this, every time I wish to check the news I would have to load the whole page, including the thousand ad gifs and swfs that engadget has.

So a simple solution would be let users set their favorite zoom level at the rss readers preferences, but a much more handy solution would be make a “special algorithm ” or something like that to automatically re size the picture, while letting the user select the text size he wants.

That ends my rant on the rendering of rss feed contents, but you think this post’s over? Oh no sir. :P

Other things that annoy me, and keep me from using the default rss reader as my main rss reader are the following:

• Mark all as read

If I’m busy all day long, and couldn’t refresh my rss reader, but have read some more important itens in my browser, the next time I refresh it it may have up to 40 non-read items, in engadget’s case. But as I already saw the important news one way or another, I don’t want to read all the 40 items again, a mark all read option would be really useful here.

• Unread items in the “Web Feeds folder”

I made a mock up of how I would like this implemented:

The number is how many unread items you have at all. Why is this useful? Well, look at my feed list:

The red arrow is pointing to the scroll bar, indicating there’s more feeds down of those that are shown. You can’t see if there are more unread items unless you scroll down, which is kind of a waste of time if there aren’t unread items. So that is where the unread items count would come handy.

And that’s all it would take to make the rss reader of my dreams lol.

S60 really encourages the use of rss, all the blogs have separate rss feeds and there is a big one with all the posts. Rss is often mentioned as the future of news delivering and S60 should polish more the interface of their reader, as even some posts in the s60 blogs have pictures to big to be comfortably viewed in the reader.

And I know that this isn’t going to happen, but if ever they make those changes to the rss reader, I would like there to be a separate .sis package so I could update the reader in my phone :3

This post was made with a V12 N95 using the dots mocha theme from Nokia.

This is not a bashing post towards S60 browser team, they made a insanely great job with the browser, you should read this more as suggestions than anything else.

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