Daily driving the FP4 for some 4 months
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So I have now been daily driving my faiphone 4 for about 4 to 6 months and in my experience, it works fairly well.
I general I have found few major bugs and the system generally feels fairly complete.
The most annoying issue is the implementation of the keyboard/dictionary. When I press the space button, i want a space to be inserted. It's not hard, but when I have to press between 2 to 3 times to get a space, leading spaces gets deleted when deleting the trailing characters of a word or using the dictionary always adds spaces, typing becomes a serious pain.
However, the the interface....... At this point, we have IOs, Android and Windows Phone, which all have the vertical for OS function and horizontal for screen manipulation/application functions. This makes application manipulation feel familiar across devices. swipe left/righ to change music track, previous/next webpage or image. Changing this is a bright idea but not a good one. I still get unwanted behavior trying to go to a previous webpage only to open the app menu or worse trying to open the app menu and moving away from my current webpage. It might work on a tablet, not on a phone.
Lastly, a sane image viewer, would be nice, like having the ability to open more than one image in a folder and organize/sort by folder/name. Sorting by tags and date is nice, but without the ability to sort by folder/name my carefully created documentation databases becomes rather unusable.
In summary, it works fine, there's a bit of a lack of apps and a few bugs, most notably: a poor implementation of the keyboard/dictionary, a lack of a functioning image viewer and a bit buggy browser. The biggest issue is still the choice of using the horizontal for OS functions, that's a no. So I'm going to try modding but I will likely be switching to something else.
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@oistein said in Daily driving the FP4 for some 4 months:
So I have now been daily driving my faiphone 4 for about 4 to 6 months and in my experience, it works fairly well.
I general I have found few major bugs and the system generally feels fairly complete.
The most annoying issue is the implementation of the keyboard/dictionary. When I press the space button, i want a space to be inserted. It's not hard, but when I have to press between 2 to 3 times to get a space, leading spaces gets deleted when deleting the trailing characters of a word or using the dictionary always adds spaces, typing becomes a serious pain.
Maybe you have auto correction or punctuation On ?. You can disable it in system settings -> Language & Text
However, the the interface....... At this point, we have IOs, Android and Windows Phone, which all have the vertical for OS function and horizontal for screen manipulation/application functions. This makes application manipulation feel familiar across devices. swipe left/righ to change music track, previous/next webpage or image. Changing this is a bright idea but not a good one. I still get unwanted behavior trying to go to a previous webpage only to open the app menu or worse trying to open the app menu and moving away from my current webpage. It might work on a tablet, not on a phone.
It needs some training, true if you come from another OS. But as it is made by design, i don't see how it can be replaced easily
Lastly, a sane image viewer, would be nice, like having the ability to open more than one image in a folder and organize/sort by folder/name. Sorting by tags and date is nice, but without the ability to sort by folder/name my carefully created documentation databases becomes rather unusable.
Make a feature request in the gallery app repository https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/apps/lomiri-gallery-app and pray for someone willing to take that
In summary, it works fine, there's a bit of a lack of apps and a few bugs, most notably: a poor implementation of the keyboard/dictionary, a lack of a functioning image viewer and a bit buggy browser. The biggest issue is still the choice of using the horizontal for OS functions, that's a no. So I'm going to try modding but I will likely be switching to something else.
We all live with some things we would like that work better, that is what to expect from a community project with a small team of volunteers
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I like the way, how ubtouch has implemented the "horizontal os functions", switching the app from the right and opening the app drawer from the left.
Apps could still implement horizontal swipes for own functionality, when swiping from the middle of the screen. Like it works here in the forum, when swiping to the right, it opens the topics overview and when swiping to the left it opens the profile-overview. -
Yeah, you might have auto correct and other "auto" things enabled. You shouldn't need to press space multiple times.
I'm not sure what you're pertaining to with webpages. Are you using Morph (default browser) or Sapot? Sapot has the different bottom gestures which seems like what you're describing. These gestures are my own ideas so they're not exactly part of the intended experience on UT. It seems like you use the swipe up from the sides though. For back/forwars, the horizontal swipe at the bottom is so much better in my opinion. Swipe up is good for other actions like opening settings, downloads, focusing address bar, find in page, etc. Also try not to put too many items so they become too compacted and small which can make them harder to to accurately select an action especially with a quick swipe. If you're not talking about Sapot, then I guess I wasted my time, your time and whoever reads this
In any case, sadly if you don't like the system navigation and gestures in UT (Lomiri) then you might need to look for other options like Plasma Mobile, Phosh,and Gnome mobile which are more similar to Android and iOS. I think one of the main reasons why UT users like UT is the gesturs. Personally, I love them. It's better and more fun to use than Android/iOS. It's not perfect and maybe needs a few tweaks here and there but the primary design is great. I can easily switch between apps without reaching for the bottom. The bottom is then very free for apps to use which what I did in my apps
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@lduboeuf & @kugiigi
Yes I do have yes, I do have spell checking, auto correction and spell checking enabled but the functionality is a bit odd.
Lets take the worst case scenario: I write a misspelled word, I press space to insert a space and move on, autocorrect corrects the word, but it is still selected, no space, I press space again, the now correctly spelled word is unselected but still no space, I press space for the third time, now I get a space and can continue writing. Expected behavior: once I press space, autocorrect should change the word and insert a space. Conversely, if I actually go and select the word from the suggestions list, a trailing space should not be inserted. Finally, this is probably a bug, but when deleting the last letter of a word, leading spaces have also been removed contracting two words in to one, although this one has been rare and I have only encountered it 3-4 times.Since I primarily write longish notes consisting of short sentences and lots of commas, the combination of these behaviors can make me spend more than half my time managing spaces instead of actually typing something new.
@kugiigi I am using both, but I prefer Sapot. Although Morp now has a tab feature, it's a bit messy So the Sapot has the better interface at the moment. When I tried just now, the only think I could do in either browser was swipe up to access the tabs menu/change tab. Sapot did this fine, morph... well it would either scroll, change tabs or open the tabs list but there were little consistency in what option it chose.
Now there are not only valid but also good reasons to have the UI and gestures set up the way UT does, like easier access to applications which is why I called it a bright idea. However there are better reasons no to, like expectations (the horizontal plane has been use for media manipulation since at least 3.11 in desktops probably longer) leaving manipulation to be button based or competing for the very limited horizontal screen real estate in mobiles. Consistency, not knowing what a swipe does. And finally with the OS functions taking up 3/4 of the screen, it leaves little for the apps, sure some apps can implement meaningful functionality but generally it just detracts from usability.
But hey, Ive given it a really good spin and I just thought I'd leave at least some feedback, because at least consistency within the current design framework would benefit everyone. At least my like or dislike of said framework is irrelevant. But yeah, Ill probably be giving Postmarket a try next.
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@oistein Yeah, just disable auto correct. No one really uses it since it's not good
No one has worked on it too so yeah, best to avoid it.As for Sapot, it has differet bottom gestures in the settings. Swipe up from middle area is for switching tabs. Swipe up from left and right area is for the direct/quick actions. Horizontal swipe can be used for back/forward in the webview. You can see it in action a bit later than halfway of this video
I'm still not sure if I understand what you're saying with the gestures though
I understand that it can take a while to not accidentally swipe from the left/right edge. Before UT, we're so used to swiping horizontallly regardless of where it started. So you'll have to be trained to swipe from the inside area. To be fair, this is now also the case with Android's gestures due to the back gesture. But I think horizontal swipe inside apps are still fine. Also technically on Android, all edges are now reserved to the system if you use the gesture navigation so UT has 1 less But in any case, thanks for the feedback for trying UT. We won't force you to use and like it. Hopefully you'll have a good time trying out the other options
