[maemo-developers] Moving windows in Maemo

[From: Mika Yrjölä]

On 4/12/07, Tapani Pälli <tapani.palli at nokia.com> wrote:

> Yes, this is *right* thing for someone, something else is *right* thing
> for someone else. Persistency sounds good to me, however I don't see
> much reason in moving modal dialogs on the screen except 'just for fun'.

For me, the main benefit for being able to move the dialogs around at
will would be the ability to position the dialog so that no
information relevant for deciding how to react to the dialog is hidden
below it. While the current default of the dialog changing to display
just a wireframe of its geometry of course allows user to see what's
below, it's not possible to interact with the dialog while looking at
the information and vice versa. On desktop I'd just drag the dialog
into some harmless position if necessary and then do whatever seems to
be appropriate.

However, I admit that it's not a significant issue to me personally in
real-world usage; most of the time I know what to do with the current
dialog anyway, and most of the dialogs are small enough to not hide
much information below.  This is pretty much proven by the fact that
I've not cared enough to play with the aforementioned -use_dialog_mode
option, even though I've known about it existing :)

(on the other hand, novice users might like things working more like
they do on 'normal' desktops, but this is quite probably something
that has received attention while designing the UI in the first place,
and I know personally roughly as much about usability as about
construction of nuclear reactors, which isn't much)