On 12/10/2015 14:25, Benjamin Francis wrote: > Please see the Gaia meeting notes from July > <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Meeting/2015-07-28#Systems_front_end>, > August > <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Meeting/2015-08-18#Systems_front_end> and > September > <https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gaia/Meeting/2015-09-08#Systems_front_end>. > > /"There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning > charts and demolition orders have been on display on the wiki for three > of your Earth months"/ -- Vogon Captain (slightly paraphrased).
Unfortunately I haven't had time to attend to the meetings or read the notes; unfortunately I'm in the unpleasant situation of having time for either fixing bugs or attending meetings but not both. Anyway my surprise mostly stemmed from the fact that we're doing it again, not that I wasn't informed. Considering our limited resources having to do full rewrites sounds like we did really poor job when planning the previous one. Anyway I'm digressing, let's get back on the topic. > In all seriousness, the new homescreen has some much improved > performance properties, a cleaner architecture based on new web > components, and is a privileged app (!) which makes it more replaceable > and potentially more updateable. The previous vertical homescreen was > built for quite a different set of requirements and had gathered some > bloat, when it came to adding a second panel had some serious > performance issues. On the topic of performance I've tried dogfooding it a bit today and noticed what looks like a significant issue: on my Flame using last Friday's latest build the new homescreen takes significantly longer to start and display the icons than the vertical one. I did a quick measurement with a stopwatch using this quick scenario: - go in an app - kill the homescreen - go back to the homescreen and time how long it takes to display the icons With 52 installed apps I see a ~5s startup time using the vertical homescreen vs a ~12s startup time for the new one. This is not a common scenario on phones with tons of memory as the homescreen will always be alive but it can be on those with less memory. > The new homescreen is not quite fully baked yet (hence off by default) > and UX have recently carried out a review. As Chris said, the > recommendations include turning off scroll snapping until it's a bit > more polished and bringing back the column setting and the edit mode. > The column setting is just tricky because the Settings API is only > available to certified apps, and the previous edit mode had its own > problems (I personally prefer the new UI). Yeah, the new edit mode is really nice. Scroll snapping on the other hand is infuriating especially since I've built plenty of muscle-memory for scrolling & hitting an app with only a slide and a tap on the old one. > Apologies that we had to drop app grouping for the time being, we > realise that a lot of people use that, but with the addition of a second > panel it started to get a bit complex. Replacing that feature is in our > backlog and there are ongoing UX workshops which include how content on > the homescreen should be organised in future. Yes please bring back the grouping & collapsing, those were really useful features that IMHO set us apart from both iOS and Android default launchers. Gabriele
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