Back to the basics: improving user experience

[Dale Maggee]

My 1/50th of a dollar...

A lot of people have made some really good points and suggestions here. 
Here's what I'd like to see personally, in order of priority, with 
absolutely no consideration given to feasability or difficulty what I 
want ;) :

1. rock-solid phone / sms functionality, with rock-solid suspend and 
resume.  I know that these are two seperate issues, but  I see Suspend 
and resume as being a neccessary part of having it work as a daily-use, 
reliable phone (for the simple reason of battery life). Having it as a 
solid, daily-use phone is my biggest priority.

2. This also comes into the 'daily use phone' category: the echo / 
volume issues. Since settings which work for some people don't seem to 
work for others, I think that one way to sort this out might be to 
create a sensibly-labelled volume control (preferrably as a 
finger-usable GUI) which has the ability to load and store states. This 
has been suggested elsewhere

3. Sort out the Distros / Software stack.
I agree with the comments that the FSO integration should be sped up. 
FSO seems very nice and solid to me, but unfortunately it's incomplete 
in terms of using it as a phone. The PIM database is the biggest thing 
missing here. I think that bringing the FSO framework into the main 
distro should be a priority,  because this will allow you guys to 
organise your efforts better and remove duplication - why continue to 
work on something that's going to be phased out in X months?

4. Calendar / Alarm / PIM.

I'd call this 'secondary phone functionality', in that it's the kind of 
functionality you see in pretty much any phone out there. A Reliable 
calendar application which lets you set meetings, reminders etc, and an 
alarm. The alarms / reminder alerts should work reliably, even if the 
Neo is suspended (i.e: come out of suspend mode to sound alarm or show a 
reminder). With regards to PIM, I'd like to see a way to synchronise my 
Neo's PIM database with some other source, like ActiveSync does. This 
doesn't have to be incredibly complicated, maybe just dumping the PIM 
database to a vcf file. The reason I want this is that whenever I flash 
a new distro I need to re-import my contacts, and I inevitably lose 
contacts which I've added to the Neo but which aren't anywhere else. 
Perhaps there's already a solution to this.

5. Pretty comes later.

Stop caring about themes and snazzy visual effects. While everyone can 
agree that pretty is a nice thing, Stability should be the priority, not 
prettiness. Don't bother making themes and whatnot, just make the 
underlying software work reliably, then provide a way for us to make our 
own themes, and let the community worry about making themes. Once 
everything is solid, then you can worry about how pretty it is.

Regards,
-Dale

John Lee wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Like Wolfgang said in
> http://n2.nabble.com/Weekly-Engineering-News-41-2008-td1336450.html
>
> We assembled a team to focus on improving the user experience.  Here
> is our todo list at the moment:
>
> * Reduce boot time.
>
> * Optimize the touch screen driver on freerunner for finger usage.
>
> * A generic python loader to enhance the start up time of python
>   scripts.
>
> * Work with system team to improve suspend/resume user experience.
>
>
> I would like to ask the community:
>
> What do you want us to work on?
>
>
> The idea is
>
> * We improve the current stack, not creating new features.
>
> * Prefer stuffs which could be brought over to gta03 instead of
>   gta02/om2008 specific.
>
> * won't work on om2007 stack.
>
>
> So, tell us what you want, then the coding monkeys will start working!
> :)
>
>
> Regards,
> John
>
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