TaskManager is one ugly piece of... UI

[Jon Phillips]

On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 08:40 -0600, Brad Midgley wrote:
> Hey
> 
> After spending a day or so working over my P1, I have to ask if the
> TaskManager is slated for removal or improvement. It is the single
> worst component of user interface on the whole device...
> 
> - switching apps on every other platform is a single click on the task
> name 
> - selecting the application from a "fuzzy" list and clicking on a
> horseshoe with a green blob is not intuitive
> - TaskManger ends up looking like the Home menu but of course behaving
> totally differently
> - the X on the left sometimes closes the task manager and sometimes
> closes an app depending on the selection
> - it's not clear what the turning arrow button does until you use it a
> few times
> - it's not clear what the benefit or advantage is to closing the task
> manager or clicking the turning arrow to hide it
> - when it's "running" the task manager takes a slot in the
> lower-right-corner switcher button, adding further confusion 
> 
> I see two ways to improve it:
> 
> 1. Remove TaskManager entirely. Use the other switcher and fix the
> "close" option in the apps so it doesn't kill the bottom bar.
> 
> 2. Make the lower-left-corner button bring up a popup menu with each
> application listed and an X after each name if you wanted to close it.
> (It could even be scrollable or tiled if it'll grows too long, but
> that will be the unusual case.) With a popup, we get back to what
> people expect in task switching and it's simple and clear to
> understand what this thing is for. It also would "go away" when you
> click somewhere else instead of cluttering up the notion of what is
> running. 
> 
> There's plenty of talk about how neo compares to iPhone and we have a
> huge potential here to show them up in some areas, but I do know Apple
> would never let such a flawed UI element out the door.
> 
> Brad

Brad, this is still at the development stages, so it is really up to us
to fix it. Could you please contribute some code, mockups, etc, to help
with this?

Jon

-- 
Jon Phillips

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