Quote:
Originally Posted by torberry
Priority should be to build a $700 phone that doesn't creak after 3 days of use!
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Exactly, that's your job to complain. I totally agree, there's some work to be done on the hardware for reducing the percentage of sample defects on the factory production line...
However, my job is as a software developer to report bugs that I see fit, and it's my natural progression in this thread. Please go start a separate thread.
As a BlackBerry developer who also happens to be a hobbyist Apple developer too (Thus my UNIQUE perspective), I also know a mantra of Apple UI guidelines is superior consistency. RIM needs to borrow a page from Apple's book. Example follows:
Quote:
Zoom Consistency Issues
Areas that "i" / "o" zooming keypress shortcuts works:
...BlackBerry Maps
...BlackBerry Browser
...Google Maps
...Formerly Picture Viewer (Curve 4.2)
Areas that "i" / "o" zooming keypress shortcuts doesn't work:
...Attachment Viewing of images
...Picture Viewer (Bold 4.6.0.125)
To improve user friendliness of zooming, because iPhone has such wonderful pinch-zoom and won't be matched until Thunder (and since not all BlackBerries are planned to be touchscreen in future, anyway) - make sure that zooming behaviour is as consistent as possible across all applications. Maybe to extend things further, when holding down a modifier key, a corner of screen could show a transparent [ZOOM 115% ||||||||---------] bargraph/counter at which point spinning the ball will zoom in/out smoothly in real-time until the trackball stops spinning or the ball is clicked. (Note, this transparent corner popup could auto-appear too when pressing the "z", "i" or "o" keys, to automatically enable the trackball to also control zooming too -- and the popup can autodissappear)
Possible suggested use cases:
User clicks "i" -- zooms in by 1 step and autoshows the zoom bar
User clicks "o" -- zooms out by 1 step and autoshows the zoom bar
User clicks "z" -- autoshows the zoom bar
User brings up menu and selects "Zoom", this autoshows the zoom bar
User spins trackball while zoom bar is shown; zooms in/out.
User holds ALT, zoom bar autoshows (for ALT+trackwheel zooming)
Zoom bar autohides after X seconds (say, 2 or 5 sec) if no keys/trackball touched.
Clicking trackball or hitting Enter will immediately autohide zoom bar
Or for screens that aren't well-represented by a zoom bar, use a zoom counter instead (like a black translucent rectangle in a corner with white text simply saying "Zoom 75%"). Currently, it's not easy to figure out where the 100% zoom level is for images, because it's not clearly marked - sometimes I like to view images on a pixel-for-pixel basis.
(By all means, RIM is free to come up with something better for non-touchscreen BlackBerries.  And please include zooming consistency behaviour in whatever UI Guidelines you use internally for BlackBerry UI design.)
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Again, start a separate thread about the legitimate Bold creaky issue (which I agree about, I just feel it doesn't belong in this software issues thread that I started.)
I also observe hundreds of users on HowardForums switching back and fourth between BlackBerry and iPhone, so such a consistency 'nitpick' is fairgame to RIM for whatever cost-benefit analysis they do, with their obvious recent iPhone-chasing behaviour -- there's a lot more agreement here to these little kinds of nitpicks than you think, especially among the non-platform-partisan crowd. (Apple users are a very nitpicky bunch, you see -- while some of them really like the BlackBerry Bold, as evidenced by the dozens of forum posts over there, even in the Rogers section -- although I am platform-neutral myself)
(To RIM: Check HowardForums.com, especially the Rogers forum, for members who own both or have switched between Bold and iPhone -- their feedback are pretty valuable)