907102 - [Messages] Focusing on the messages field is hard

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::SMS, defect)

Description

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

Attachment: VID_20130820_110802.mp4

This is on 1.1 hamachi partner release from the beginning of August.

The messages area in SMS is very hard to focus, I think I miss it about 70% of the time. Please see the video.

Comment 1

[Rick Waldron [:rwaldron]]

Works well for me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC6Y9y6Df5E

Comment 2

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

Yes, if you click on the right spot :p. The thing is that (at least for me) I tap right above the sweet spot and the thing will unfocus which happens a lot.

Comment 3

[Rick Waldron [:rwaldron]]

(In reply to Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] from comment #2)
> Yes, if you click on the right spot :p. The thing is that (at least for me)
> I tap right above the sweet spot and the thing will unfocus which happens a
> lot.

But that's not a bug in Messages app

Comment 4

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

It is. The hit area is too small.

Comment 5

[Rick Waldron [:rwaldron]]

(In reply to Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] from comment #4)
> It is. The hit area is too small.

The event is bound to the entire input element, not just a portion of it.

Comment 6

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

Attachment: Element is very small

As you can see in this screenshot the element is only a small portion of the message area. User perception will be that all is clickable but thats not the case. Atm the height is 23px and the top and bottom aren't clickable (form has total height of 37px). That's way too small according to all UX guidelines out there (f.e. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1085). I'd suggest we even take the 20 pixels above this as hit area because there is nothing else that's interesting for the user there. If a click ends about somewhere around there it's probably for one of the controls in that bar.

Comment 7

[Sergi Mansilla [:sergi] (Telenor) [PTO]]

I've just tried it myself, and I could focus on the text input field 2 out of 8 times I tapped into what I consider the SMS text field. Whatever issue it really is, the effect is that it is potentially really frustrating for the user IMHO.

Comment 8

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Aug 14)]

I think this is valid, and we'd perfectly accept a patch about this :)

Comment 9

[Joe Cheng [:jcheng] (please needinfo)]

this is not blocking for the v1.2 release but fixes definitely welcome. master is open now. will you be able to provide a patch?

Comment 10

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

I'm currently in the middle of Keyboard 1.2 work, but I can write a patch after that.

Comment 11

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Aug 14)]

Might be automagically fixed by event fluffing in bug 900638 :) It's worth waiting for this.

Comment 12

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

No, APZC is not being used in the messages app (at least not yet) so bug 900638 will not help you here.

Comment 13

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Aug 14)]

kats> oki, thanks. And is it something possible in a soonish future, or should we try to use more traditional means for this specific bug (ie make the target bigger) ?

Comment 14

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Event fluffing should already be happening in the messages app, AFAIK. So if it's not triggering easily either it's hitting an edge case in the fluffing code, or you just need to make the target bigger. Based on comment 6 it sounds like making it bigger would help regardless. I don't know the details of the fluffing algorithm so I don't know if it's likely that there is a bug in this case.

Comment 15

[Dale Harvey (:daleharvey)]

Yeh this should already be working on the messages app

https://github.com/mozilla/mozilla-central/blob/master/layout/base/PositionedEventTargeting.cpp#L171

Vivien added which should mean contentEditable areas work and are targetted by fluffing, its pretty simple to check if fluffing it working (absolutely position a div where your click happens, click near

Comment 16

[Julien Wajsberg [:julienw] (PTO -> Aug 14)]

I think it works fine these days, at least nobody complained for a long time.