[Hero, G2 Touch Android Development] dkelley:
<rant>

I'm a full time senior developer for commercial web and android gaming companies.... if I released one of my products with that same exact "not so much a feature flaw", my job would be in jeopardy. It is a feature flaw by definition; as I said I'm not the only user with this experience and the very fact that you and so many others know how to solve this problem shows how frequently it has come up in forums.

I definitely don't have "flubby fingers"... I don't take offense to the term LoL but definitely feel that is inaccurate... I'm very fast on touch screen devices and the faster you go the more frequently you do subtle swipes when releasing your finger.

the flaw is that there is a press and swipe motion that brings up a contextual menu which includes an option to remove the app drawer completely. No other confirmation of any kind, just move your finger quickly in the wrong direction and it triggers both events without you having enough time to even read the popup context menu.

Fast responsiveness is a wonderful thing - but not when the developer stupidly popups his context menus right where your finger already is sitting that made the context menu come up in teh first place, and then one of those options is "break something", which effectively this combination is doing.

He didn't follow some very important UI development rules.

Anyhow, I know the fix that you described (who doesn't?) and I did that in the past. Then one day this happened again and guess what? I couldn't find/remember the fix in a sticky situation when I was trying to do something rather urgently on my phone.

(a) Why should I have to go searching through the extensive options, settings, and long press context menus and their extensive submenus just to try and fix something that shouldn't be possible to break by accident so easily?

(b) when I'm trying to use the app drawer, the single most fundamentally important feature in android launchers (why it's called a launcher in the first place!), there should be NOTHING that can remove that fundamental feature from the UI.

It should be impossible to remove this feature completely. To have to jump over stupid convoluted hurdles like adding the app drawer icon to an empty space on a home screen and then drag it back on (or whatever the trick is) is a huge mistake also. That is arguably a larger design flaw than the original mistake.

Let's see - we can remove the app drawer from the dock. Ooops! now I want it back.

let's long press the dock... nothing.

let's tap on the empty space where the app drawer was until it disappeared on me... nothing.

let's go into adw preferences and reset the launcher... NOTHING.

Anything you can remove must be able to be replaced, and UI development guidelines state that it should be done in the same way that it was originally removed - like long press on the app drawer icon (or where it used to be). Launcher pro, for example, follows the official Android developer UI style rules by using long-press on an icon in the dock to alter it. Want the app drawer back in LP? long press on a spot and choose it.

Why doesn't adw launcher follow android developer rules? why does it force users to use a workaround to repair their now broken/deleted/missing/removed app drawer?

The app drawer should be able to be relocated, alter, anything like that. But to be able to completely kill the app drawer, even if the developer had included unavoidable confirmation dialogs? no way - major flaw. to make it easy to do, on purpose or by accident, incredibly major flaw. to make it impossible to add it back in the same way you removed it but instead to have to use a completely different UI functionality (adding a home screen shortcut LoL - nothing to do with the dock at all), well this is just unforgivable.

</rant>

ok, that was a good thing to get off my chest hahaha

:-)

This is nothing personal against you - but if adw users would all let him know how big of a mistake that ui decision is then he'd fix it and we'd have a truly great AND RELIABLE launcher out of that product.

Cheers

Don

---------- Post added at 08:49 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:47 AM ----------

thanks, yea I'll have to try that next time I'm on adw by accident :-)

but it's an annoying workaround to the original flawed design since again when it's unlocked it's way too easy to accidentally kill the app drawer and forget how to get it back again.