805682 - provide visible affordance for going Home in B2G Desktop

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Attachment: work-in-progress patch

B2G Desktop has a keyboard shortcut for dispatching events that are the equivalent of pressing the Home button on a phone, but there isn't any visible user interface affordance for this functionality, and new users of B2G Desktop tend to have trouble discovering it, even though it's documented in a number of places.

So B2G Desktop would benefit from a visible affordance for pressing the Home button.  For the Firefox OS Simulator, in the v1 spec <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S538182p1zwCAFHvIRTYCu0LkdHLVh3KZCVhOdKbh1Q/edit> and issue 41 <https://github.com/mozilla/r2d2b2g/issues/41>, kdangoor suggests a Home button on a toolbar or a Home item on a menu.

Both are doable, but the button on a toolbar seems preferable, since Home on phones is typically implemented via a (soft or hard) button on a (physical or virtual) toolbar at the bottom of the phone's screen.

Here's a work-in-progress patch that implements the button-on-toolbar approach.  Remaining issues include:

* the toolbar appears at the top of the window instead of the bottom (where phone toolbars usually are);
* the toolbar pushes part of the content area offscreen;
* the button is displayed as a label rather than an icon.

All of these issues are tractable, so I can put together a reviewable patch in short order.

Dietrich: who should I run this by for a product/UX perspective?  Before I do the rest of the work to get to a reviewable patch, I'd like confirmation that this is consistent with the purpose of B2G Desktop and reasonable in the eyes of its product owner.

Comment 1

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

Myk,

I don't think this is the solution we want. Indeed the simulator would benefit from an on-screen Home button, as well as some devices that have no buttons. The right way to do that is to add some media queries support (see bug 771551) and add the button depending on the media query in the system app.

Comment 2

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Bug 771551 seems like a good general solution to the problem of supporting devices whose hardware is out of our control, but in this case we do control the "hardware" (i.e. the chrome of the application), so we don't need to employ that general solution--we can decide that the application's hardware will feature a Home button.

And in fact we already have made that decision and implemented a hardware Home button: the Home key on the keyboard.  It just isn't very discoverable.

Bug 771551 is also a more involved solution that will take more time to implement than the time frame in which we want to get developers using B2G Desktop to test their webapps.  So even if it was the right long-term fix, it's still worth implementing a chrome Home button in the short term.

Comment 3

[[:fabrice] Fabrice Desré]

We *really* don't want to add chrome to shell.xul.

Comment 4

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

(In reply to Fabrice Desré [:fabrice] from comment #3)
> We *really* don't want to add chrome to shell.xul.

Hmm, that makes sense for B2G on devices, but there are use cases for chrome in the desktop application to better simulate a device environment to make it easier to test one's apps (and the operating environment generally).

Comment 5

[Myk Melez [:myk] [@mykmelez]]

Fabrice and I talked further in person, and I agreed to try using an addon to modify B2G Desktop to make it useful for testing apps.  And I've since verified that it's possible to do so (modulo various bugs in B2G Desktop that we'll need to fix or work around).

I still think making these changes to B2G Desktop itself is preferable, and the app testing use case is the most important one for B2G Desktop to support, so I don't understand why we wouldn't want changes like this in B2G Desktop.  But I'll try the addon approach for now.