Hi, Its great to see the first technology preview of Qt Quick Components for Symbian! Here are a few thoughts on the UI from a random member of the public :)
My overall impression is that these widgets aren't really like anything in Symbian^3 at all. They look quite similar to the widgets from the Meego Touch Framework. Some of the changes worry me a little, because there are parts of the Symbian^3 UX which are attractive and work well, and it would be a shame to lose them. To me it seems that one of the main problems with Symbian usability is a lack of consistency between applications. If Qt Components apps behave radically differently to other Symbian apps this isn't going to help. My comments below come mainly from playing with the qmlgallery application. * Transitions The transition speed of dialogs and menus seems to be set far too long. The fading and sliding effects should be subtle and not feel like they are slowing me down. The dialogs slowly fade into view, which doesn't look as good as the sliding or zooming/popping animation that you get when a native Symbian^3 query dialog opens. I like the way checkboxes animate when clicked (the checkboxes themselves seem a little small on the N8 screen though). Perhaps radio buttons could have a similar animation. I think having the button label text "wobble" when released is a bit weird :) * Dialog boxes Personally, I think that native Symbian^3 query dialogs are one of the more visually appealing parts of its UI. The dialogs in qmlgallery look rather disappointing in comparison. They are small and cramped and some of the text doesn't have proper margins. I would prefer if Dialog and QueryDialog were anchored at the bottom of the screen, and the buttons looked like soft-keys. I don't see any advantage in them being centered and it makes things behave needlessly differently to native Symbian apps. * Menus I prefer the appearance of the native S^3 menus. I think this is because of the bigger fonts and nice use of gradients. * ContextMenu Is ContextMenu meant to appear anchored above another component? It isn't in qmlgallery, and just looks like a SelectionDialog without a title. I don't think these should be the full width of the screen, but just big enough to fit the contents, like the context menu on the Symbian^3 homescreen. * Softkeys Are softkey menus dead? It looks like they have been replaced with one menu and a back button. This probably makes sense. Having a consistent place for a back button is one of the things I like most about the Maemo5 interface. * SectionScroller I don't think this is working properly in qmlgallery. * Haptic feedback Will this be coming to QtComponents? This is another highlight of the S^3 interface, so I hope it will be available to QtComponents apps. Thanks for reading! Justin _______________________________________________ Qt-components mailing list Qt-components@qt.nokia.com http://lists.qt.nokia.com/mailman/listinfo/qt-components
