[General Topics] eaglesteve:
Thoughts on wizards

Jacob,

Thank you so much for your effort. I really would like to know as much as I can on what sorts of widgets are available in Android. Specifically, I would like to have a ONE PAGE widget that can show ALL the key information, and if possible a very very quick way to access that from ANYWHERE (from within any application).

Multipage wizards are of not much use for me because if I'm prepared to go to so many screens to have constant glance of those info, I might as well go to the real applications.

In addition to a "one page key info" wizard, I also love to have ONE page of "SHOWING OFF SUPERWALLPAPRE" widget for the lockscreen or homepage. HTC weather is extremely alluring candidate, but I wonder if ther are others which are even better than HTC's weather.

@Barkleyfan and @karnovaran as well as anyone not using Sense, could you share with us what you would consider the very best "SHOWING OFF SUPERWALLPAPRE" widget available?

I know what you mean, and I completely agree with you. However, I personally also feel that there is a role for sexing up the "Shop Front" (just the front page) of a device with extremely appealing animating high definition widgets like the HTC weather. I'll be dishonest to tell you that I'm not attracted to it. But I'm aware that it is not necessary the most useful. For me, it is just for showing up, and not for use. For weather, I need to see the rain radar, I want to have severe weather warning such as hailstorm, flood, earthquake warning to alert me even if the weather program isn't running.

I do not want to let widget overtake the role of a proper application, for a few reasons:

- widgets typically have poor functions.

- widgets tend to be more buggy. I found that to be the case when using my HTC Touch HD. The calendar, photo album, music players all are slow, buggy, and I hated using them. I personally would not even like them occupying any of my desktop page.

- they have completely user interface from the usual application, and I hate that. I like to see exactly the same way to switch from application to application. When a wizard is used in place of an application, this is not possible.

- it is faster switching to a proper application than coming back to use the wizard, and to switch back to where I came from.

I guess because I was focusing so much on HTC Supersonic, I had subconsciously ignored custom ROM. How good really are the Cyanogen ROMs? Is it usually very quickly that Cynogen release the most recent Android OS on devices? Does he usually just release ROM for the device that he owns only?

MY OTHER THOUGHTS ON WIZARD

My own guesses is that HTC wizard's has its history linked to the weakness of winmo OS. In those days where winmo applications simply turn off people, HTC has good reasons to replace (calendar, contact, dialer, etc) with its own to give the less knowledgeable user the illusion that this is how every applications look and feel using Winmo. Then there was the need to show off the fact that the device is finger friendly (this reason is not there any more today). Therefore, I understand that HTC Manila and subsequent family of desktop had lots of such features. When HTC moved from Winmo to Android OS, this was probably carried over as a tradition of what should appear on the desktop, and nobody within the HTC development team seriously rethink why these features should continue. I personally think that Android application has US attractive enough to stop having such competing features on the desktop.

On the PC, because applications can be run in non-full screen mode, wizards do allow critical information to be available at all times. This is not the case with mobile device, so key information access should be designed differently. Perhaps it should be integrated into the notification bar to allow instant access to them anywhere.

Not sure how many of you agree with me on these thoughts. Would be nice to hear your thoughts too.

NEXT AREA OF FOCUS

I like to see more examples of wizards or better wizards, from both Sense and non-Sense platform. After that has been satisfactorily completed, I would like to compare the Search capability in more details. I'm primarily talking about global search here, but will also cover search related applications.