wm6.5.3 with 6.5 styled bottom bar? - Windows Mobile Software Development

hi guys i'm a newbie here keen on knowing if any masters out here have successfully got rid of the 6.5.3 bottom bar for 6.5 styled. personally i really hate the big n ugly 6.5.3 bottom bar -- my phone has got 4 hardware buttons so there's really no need to upsize them on screen the only thing i might find upsizing useful is keyboard show/hide, which btw i find is exactly what wm7 is doing.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/18/windows-mobile-7-ui-confirmed-by-microsoft

Um, the entire point of 6.5.3 is that bottom bar... That makes it far more finger friendly along with some other small tweaks to some drop downs and check boxes. Otherwise it is essentially the same as 6.5.

taoist said:
hi guys i'm a newbie here keen on knowing if any masters out here have successfully got rid of the 6.5.3 bottom bar for 6.5 styled. personally i really hate the big n ugly 6.5.3 bottom bar -- my phone has got 4 hardware buttons so there's really no need to upsize them on screen the only thing i might find upsizing useful is keyboard show/hide, which btw i find is exactly what wm7 is doing.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/18/windows-mobile-7-ui-confirmed-by-microsoft
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you can search for 218xx series 6.5 rom. These are old style 6.5 roms.

Nagrom Nniuq said:
Um, the entire point of 6.5.3 is that bottom bar... That makes it far more finger friendly along with some other small tweaks to some drop downs and check boxes. Otherwise it is essentially the same as 6.5.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think a better way to say it is: When one goes to a 6.5.3 ROM, how does he get rid of the retarded oversized buttons at the bottom of the screen?

Nagrom Nniuq said:
Um, the entire point of 6.5.3 is that bottom bar... That makes it far more finger friendly along with some other small tweaks to some drop downs and check boxes. Otherwise it is essentially the same as 6.5.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
But I dont really think it's practical. They' could've simply made a larger top bar, with regular buttons at the bottoms.
So there is no way to make the bottom bar thinner/ return to the WM6.5 setup in 6.5.3?

Nagrom Nniuq said:
Um, the entire point of 6.5.3 is that bottom bar... That makes it far more finger friendly along with some other small tweaks to some drop downs and check boxes. Otherwise it is essentially the same as 6.5.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
seems like there's no way around this...my point is that i don't need the bottom bar to be finger friendly, i just need it to show labels for my left/right soft buttons, which are hardware buttons i can happily press with my finger.
the only ui improvement i see in 6.5.3 is the tabs being replaced by pivots, which sadly do not feature kinetic scrolling...think i'll still stick to 6.5 for the time being and wait to see what com5 will be like...

Or try my theme with the Plain Toolbar. Perhaps this is what you want?

Nagrom Nniuq said:
Um, the entire point of 6.5.3 is that bottom bar...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ENTIRE POINT, lol...

WM6.5.3 has a big bottom bar. Period. Why make a bigger top bar where your thumb can't easily reach one handed. The idea is to make everything within reach of your THUMB, which is the fattest digit on your hand, thus needs a bigger area.
Stop using a WM6.5.x OS as a standard Wm6.5 device. Sure if you use your phone with your 1 hand while tapping the screen with your index finger of your other hand, then bigger buttons are a waste. But start using your phone with one hand, like we used to, and you'll appricieate the bigger buttons.
The whole new layout style is built from the ground up. Themes, Graphics, UI settings, image height, everything is revamped to allow the new style. You can't simply flip a switch and flip flop. It is what it is. If you don't like the new style, then use an build based off of the old style. It's that simple.

bottom bar is the best thing that has happened to WM

mxl180 said:
bottom bar is the best thing that has happened to WM
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Seriously? Does it still look like this? Because this is the fugliest interface I've seen in a LONG time.

player911 said:
The whole new layout style is built from the ground up. Themes, Graphics, UI settings, image height, everything is revamped to allow the new style. You can't simply flip a switch and flip flop. It is what it is. If you don't like the new style, then use an build based off of the old style. It's that simple.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know any fix or tweak for the soft button bar, but you can tweak sizes of a lot of other features, such as the pop-up menu items which are way too big for my tastes, and the spacing in file explorer and and regedit. The main 6.5.x-specific registry keys are all in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Today (menu and listview), and they are imported with the .tsk files. I've got a thread on it here.
I'll add, there are also registry keys that sound from their name that they might tweak the size of the soft key bar (like the group under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Today\Softkeybar, lol), but I haven't played with them at all. I like the large size, even though I thought it was fugly as hell before I actually tried it out. The problem is that I think you may need to tweak other things, like the \RadioButton or \PushButton keys, so it may take some effort to shrink the thing down and to shrink the soft keys.

However the release date of WM7 has been delayed. Microsoft may still find WM7 has something that should be improved.

Farmer Ted: tks for the advice...i'll play around with the reg and see what happens
i think different ppl have different ideas about a big bottom bar, which boils down to dif usage habits and handsets. that's why i think ms should give an option for 'classic' bottom bar like they do with vista/7. i prefer operating my handset with thumb only as well, but as said my diamond2 has got 4 buttons so i don't actually have to press the bottom bar buttons on screen.
astart: i find wm7 bottom bar better from the screen shots, though the battery/signal indicators are just a dumb waste of real estate...

I was sceptical at first too. Didn't see the point of losing any screen space.
But I have to say that having the buttons below, although I have HW-buttons, is much easier to use. Just touch, not press.
At to that your skin of choice and you are all set
I do however find the topbar still something to work on.
Maybe an app to hide and unhide the top/bottom bars would do the trick..
If there is an need.

The bottom bar is not wasted screen space because it grew by the same amount the top bar shrunk. It is better in every way. There was a whole lot of extra room down there (two softkeys and the SIP button) while the top was crowded.
With the new way, there bottom now has 5 buttons, everything fits just perfectly, but now the top can have both clock and battery at the same time, a bunch of status indicators, and still hold the full program name on the left. No more screen space was used, yet more was fit on and start and OK are easier to hit with your fingers now (though those buttons have been on most recent devices making them a bit redundant, though keeping them is better than not having them at all).

khaytsus said:
Seriously? Does it still look like this? Because this is the fugliest interface I've seen in a LONG time.
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Click to collapse
Lumic said:
You removed the fugliness. 6.5.x is an enjoyable experience now.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, man !
Anyway, I don't understand why MS didn't remove the Start and close buttons altogether - after all, all (?) devices have these as hardware buttons. This way, apps would have 4 softkeys...

Related

Today Screen Fiddling!!

Hi all
Have now virtually achievd my perfect TODAY screen, but for ONE problem. It is just SLIGHTLY too large, thus bringing up a scroll bar on the right hand side- with around 1mm of scroll!!
I have done all I can to shrink and move things, and I believe I now have 2 options left- neither of which I know how to do......
1) Slightly reduce font size on owner information (which I want to keep), AND?OR get the phone no. oto the same line as my name.
2) I wish to keep the screen lock option that appears on today by default (the padlock that stops any screen activations in your pocket). Am wondering if I can add this to one of my SPB PocketPlus tabs as a shortcut- but have no idea where the .exe file is to point to.
Any help much appreciated,
Justin
Why dont you post screenshots. More great suggestions will come in for sure.
Yer tiz.......
Don't laugh- but I love the colouration of the guava theme with the black of the orbit! - just don't like black with black
You can just.... see the tip of the "device unlock" padlock at the bottom of the screen. All is adjusted to optimum (as far as I can tell)- apart from the 2 points I mentioned at the start of the thread- owner info, and device lock shortcut.
Thanks again
Justin
Rainbow-Lentil said:
Yer tiz.......
Don't laugh- but I love the colouration of the guava theme with the black of the orbit! - just don't like black with black
You can just.... see the tip of the "device unlock" padlock at the bottom of the screen. All is adjusted to optimum (as far as I can tell)- apart from the 2 points I mentioned at the start of the thread- owner info, and device lock shortcut.
Thanks again
Justin
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi bro,
If you made some search through the net you would find the solution. I've made search, I've found the souliton.
Just try the attached file, I think that's exactly what you need...
Cheers,
B.
View attachment 53852
cant you make the size of pocketbreeze plugin a little smaller?
Or just reduce the size of SPB Diary... in worst case there appears a scroll bar in the Diary window...
SPB diary, and pocket plus have been made as small as possible. The scroll bar to the right is what I am trying to get rid of, ans the today screen extends down too far.
zsitvayb- thanks mate- that zip file has allowed me to shortcut the device lock onto the spb tabs. This has reduced the info at the bottom, and lost me the scroll bar. Can now see 5 days of wether- not 4!!
Would still be interested though in any way of tinkering with the owner info appearance on the today screen....
Remove your soft keys
I use wisbar advanced3, it has the option of removing the soft keys from the today screen, then using AEButton plus I made the soft key buttons have the same function as they originally did, soft key/1 press, contacts/long press, and I have lost no functionallity at all with a bit more real estate. Hope that makes sense. Also the features of WA3 are great and your today screen would look even better with some nice WA3 icons on the taskbar. If only it was free.
Thanks unique boy (tempted to call you uniqua- but unless you have young kids, or are a student you may not know the "backyardigans"!!).
Understand what you are saying- interesting idea. Does the wisbar affect speed at all??
Rainbow-Lentil said:
SPB diary, and pocket plus have been made as small as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's not quite true. Remove one of the tabs (in Diary settings). After that you can decrease the height by another 20 picsels or so.
But this would then lose the fuctionality that I built up???
Use this cab to remove soft keys
fazwarts said:
That's not quite true. Remove one of the tabs (in Diary settings). After that you can decrease the height by another 20 picsels or so.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you are using SPB 2.5.5 you can make the tabs horizontal and then add a custom tab and inside the custom TAB move the weather or any other today plugin...!
Like what I have done on my screen...
cheers
Have you tried using slide to unlock.
I find this great and you wouldnt need the lock icon on the screen.
Just a though and help you need pm me
WA3
As far as I can tell WA3 does not slow down my artemis. The skin I use is called "reflections" it can be found on lakeridge's forum. Nice new wait cursor, lovely cascading menus, float window. I like it.
Thanks to all- certainly a few ideas there to try.
Keep up the good work- invaluable resource!!!!!!

New Sliding Panel Homescreen!!! ODPanels!!

Hey ya'll.
I've been working on a new idea for the sliding panels layout. It is fully functional so far, I am currently working on the exe for everyone, so that you may keep your current layout order and all icons, then have them swapped to the new panel layout.
Below are some pics of what it looks like. For all intensive purposes, what I have done is position the layout of the screen so that the panels still move left to right, but scrolling between panels is done also left to right using the icons at the bottom of the homescreen. You still push up and down to scroll between the panels, but it appears as though it's moving left to right.
I am still going to spice up the resolution of the pngs for the different icons, but here it is so far. In a few days, I will have a cab posted for everyone to download. This is a solo project for me, so it will take a little longer since there is no one but me working on this.
Check out post #2 for additional pics.
Let me know what you think!!
Here are some more photos
Here's the rest of the shots I have so far.
the pictures look great.
im just not sure what you mean by the up/down and left/right etc. stuff.
could you explain?
but besides thatttt... good job =]
easy
Simple, Watson.
LOL, what I meant was, you scroll through the panels just as before, there's no difference in the motions.
With this new layout though, instead of your condensed icons running from top to bottom, I have put them at the bottom of the screen in a bar/slider.
Now you have the entire homescreen to display your active panels, and have an even COOLER row of condensed icons, that scroll as you move from panel to panel. That's it.
jcrain11 said:
the pictures look great.
im just not sure what you mean by the up/down and left/right etc. stuff.
could you explain?
but besides thatttt... good job =]
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It looks like the launcher/panel/bar/whatever in MacOS X. "Mousing over" the icons with the up/down keys shows the panel for that icon. Right and left then work just like they do now. Right?
Yep
Right-O me matey. By the way, wassup beartard, we haven't talked in forever. How's it going? I'll get with you on the im, later.
Hope you like this. We can customize this to make it work anyway you want. This has a bar like you call MacOS X, I'd like to refer to it as more of an "Object Desktop" kinda thing. I will have some more theme ideas for this as well with some new dll's for the bronzeres.dll. You can already see some of that from the screenshots I have.
beartard said:
It looks like the launcher/panel/bar/whatever in MacOS X. "Mousing over" the icons with the up/down keys shows the panel for that icon. Right and left then work just like they do now. Right?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi i love the idea and am going to try it out.
suggestion thought i think it might look cleaner if the panel on top the active one i mean had some sort of border or something to case it in. I bet that intails alot of work but i thought that might look nice.
maybe a light round cornered rectangle of equal proportions for all panels transparent just a faint white? LOL like the original slideing panels but youre setup lol
Looks really sweet so far man, will it include your weather app as well? Great work looks like it will be a much needed change to sliding panels!
It does look great, good job
Good job, it looks great. So when will this be available to use for download?
I am about ready
I have this setup for layouts already. I am trying to figure out how the hell to customize this for everyone, I am having luck, but it's coming along slowly.
I am glad you all like this so far. I am going to make this work with my weather app, plus as far the weather app is concerned I am gonna have to make it have this app be compatible, so there is a lot to do. I wanted to let you all know that the way this works will cause all of your custom panels to be located over a general "small" icon on the bottom row.
What I mean by that is, this uses your iconpaths in your registry, so that you don't have to use my custom made icons. You can keep your own. But since all of the custom panels have the same GUID value in the registry, it will put your icons for your custom panels all over the bottom row and not look pretty, so in order to fix this, I have to put all of your custom icons in one area on the bottom row of icons. If you look at the screenshots, you can see what I mean. All of your active icons will display over the generic hard drive icon, which represents your custom panels. Other than this one thing, it works flawlessly. Unless I here some serious flack about that one thing I just mentioned, I should have this out in a day or so.
Later
jdoggraz said:
Good job, it looks great. So when will this be available to use for download?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh right on, well I will be waiting for this. Thanks again for putting something like this together.
Here's some more shots
I have toyed around with having a background for the icons at the bottom.
I am gonna make several different layouts with different pics, but this structure of the homescreen will stay the same regardless. It will always be a left to right sliding look.
Also, I have gotten integrated with my weather app.
Also, I have made some new xml's for this, you can choose from the iconbar uptop, which will have new icons, you can also have one with no iconbar, or one with the topbarnotes plugin on top. All of these will come with a version with a background for the iconbar or topbarnotes and a version of each with no background.
I will post more screenshots later. Got the family thing to do for now, enjoy.
jdoggraz said:
Oh right on, well I will be waiting for this. Thanks again for putting something like this together.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
this is tight.. i like this.. im waitin on u no pressure
Fantastic!
I love that you have the actual battery and signal strength percentage...
I absolutely love it.
Looks like a useful util
Thnx
So when is launch date?
Looks nice so far...
will it support portrait mode ?
OD man your killing me. I can't wait to try this out. I have been waiting for the install since you first posted this. JK don't rush it.

[REQ] Notification screen bottom

Hi!
I'm quite new to theming with the SGS and I'm a complete noob when it comes to Photoshop, my friends tend to laugh at me in class when we're doing sth in PS. I actually have a request, I don't think it's hard to accomplish, because of all the amazing things I've seen in this section.
Okey, here it goes, the default notification screen (that grey thing you pull down ), I'd like the bottom of it to have actual angles, instead of being round and to go to the actual bottom of the screen, so nothing but the notification screen (and the bar up top obviously) is visible.
I hope I made any sense and I'd very much appreciate if some1 would even consider trying to create this for me and/or others ofcourse.
Thanks!
EDIT: Forgot to mention this, I'm running on XXJPO for the i9000, current ROM is Doc's v7.5 if that matters aswell.
bump
10char
If you get rid of the bar at the bottom when it is fully open, how would you close the drawer?
deepside7 said:
If you get rid of the bar at the bottom when it is fully open, how would you close the drawer?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
.....possibly run your finger down the back of the phone?
He means the graphic at the bottom of the notification drawer when fully open which you can skin to be what ever you want... Just cause the image has changed doesn't make it's job change as well. There were a few (personal) themes I made that I removed it and gave the small illusion of extra space
Besides which the back button works just as well

Improving IE9

I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. And I believe there are some alternatives in the marketplace that do something similar (surfcube coming to mind). But here is what I think IE9 should do to make getting to your open tabs easier. You could also use this same concept to pivot to your favorites.
There will be a problem when you are zoomed in.
The gesture will conflict with scrolling.
One way around that is you only get to tiles when fully zoomed out, but then the idea is not that great anymore, it will be confusing for some people.
nizzon said:
There will be a problem when you are zoomed in.
The gesture will conflict with scrolling.
One way around that is you only get to tiles when fully zoomed out, but then the idea is not that great anymore, it will be confusing for some people.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
He said "Edge-Pixel-Detection", so you have to swipe from outside the screen into the screen to complete this gesture, which would work perfectly
Great idea. I would also add a similar page for bookmarks on the other side.
Or just give us Opera
DeathLamp said:
He said "Edge-Pixel-Detection", so you have to swipe from outside the screen into the screen to complete this gesture, which would work perfectly
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thats not very intuitive now is it?
There must be many better ways than this.
There are a lot of similar features hidden throughout Windows Phone that you have to just find or learn from someone else.
Not really when it comes to gestures, right?
nizzon said:
Not really when it comes to gestures, right?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually there are quite a few gesture and tap-and-hold type of features that are not at all intuitive (meaning, most people would probably not discover them on their own, unless by accident). Just look at the features of the SIP. I would bet that at least half of WP7 users still don't know that you can tap-and-hold the symbols toggle, and then slide your finger over a symbol to select it, which causes the symbol key set to be dismissed and returns to the alphabet key set.
but there might be problems in landscape mode, where some phones have capacitative buttons at the bottom it would get annoying if you accedentally hit the back button every time u wanted to switch tabs
epkfaile said:
but there might be problems in landscape mode, where some phones have capacitative buttons at the bottom it would get annoying if you accedentally hit the back button every time u wanted to switch tabs
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah I was actually thinking about this, especially after seeing the video of Windows 8, where they actually have this implemented. On Win8, it is from the top and bottom, and I was thinking, that wouldn't work on the phone because of the capacitive buttons. The solution my thoughts ended on was that when in landscape mode, it would work like Win8, and you would slide from the top and bottom (which is really the side, the same side that in portrait mode you would be sliding from). So the only thing that would really change is the gesture your hand is performing would change from a horizontal one to a vertical moving gesture.
RoboDad said:
Actually there are quite a few gesture and tap-and-hold type of features that are not at all intuitive (meaning, most people would probably not discover them on their own, unless by accident). Just look at the features of the SIP. I would bet that at least half of WP7 users still don't know that you can tap-and-hold the symbols toggle, and then slide your finger over a symbol to select it, which causes the symbol key set to be dismissed and returns to the alphabet key set.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not exactly sure what this SIP feature you are talking about but there is a big difference with features having multiple gestures for the same feature, than haveing two different features with almost exactly the same gesture.
Thats not the same thing, its more confusing.
tiny17 said:
I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. And I believe there are some alternatives in the marketplace that do something similar (surfcube coming to mind). But here is what I think IE9 should do to make getting to your open tabs easier. You could also use this same concept to pivot to your favorites.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you try our SurfCube browser for WP7, you can see that we have already implemented this and a lot more, with an added 3D twist.
Here is a demo video:
Cheers,
András
All I need is a back button (cause seriously who uses forward) and a tab button and IE9 would be awesome. I like the idea of using your finger to swipe and view tabs, but instead it would be smarter to use a multi-fingered gesture. As said before, scrolling would get interfered with, and because you only scroll with one finger a two finger swipe would work.
Good idea.
But there are tons of simpler, if less effective, ways of opening tabs or favs. Instead, they chose to simply replace them with menus on Mango, as well as removing the very cool top black address-bar, replaced with a huge and ugly grey one, even in landscape. ù
So, my impression is that they simply borked the interface because they don't have a clue, and any good suggestion like yours will go into the trashbin, if anyone that matters actually reads it.
Also the single page for favs and history was very cool. And ie9 doesn't load most wordpress mobile-view comments. Way to go ie team, nice direction.
Edge-pixel detection is one of Nokia's more stupid ideas. Even the people who are being paid to demo the handsets mess up quite regularly, swiping from the edge when they want to scroll, resulting in unwanted app switching. It's a badly thought out concept, which is why nobody else has done it.

Quick controls instead of navigation bar? Just an idea...

Edit: Forget it, s2d2 just made me realize that the newer versions of LMT have integrated exactly the stuff I'm talking about here
First of all, I’m no developer and I don’t even know if this stuff is possible, I just wanted to share my thoughts about an alternative way to navigate through the OS without wasting too much space with the navigation bar.
I use roman’s awesome AOKP ROM at the moment, which has an option included to hide navigation bar. To access home/back/menu/recent, you have to use an app like LMT for example.
Although LMT works quite ok, I think it is not the ideal solution to replace navigation bar. Drawing symbols is not as intuitive as I imagined it to be and it looks kind of weird how the homescreen and many apps react while drawing the symbols.
So I thought about alternatives and I had the following idea:
Would it be possible to create something like the quick controls from the browser for system-wide use? Let's say you swipe up from the bottom of the screen and a set of buttons appears in a half circle like it does in the browser. Of course it should work system-wide and across all apps, just like LMT.
To make it available across all apps, it would be necessary to still reserve a "swipe space" on the bottom to differ between app input and navigation bar access. It could be smaller though since you don't need to show any information on it. Theoretically, a line with a width of one pixel should be enough since the swipe gesture would start outside the screen (which makes me think, maybe this line can be a battery bar at the same time )
I see some advantages in this kind of navigation:
- maximum screen real estate
- a swipe from the bottom would be quicker and more intuitive than drawing symbols (where you have to remember the shape and the starting point for every action)
- smaller chance to trigger navigation buttons accidentally (for example while writing with onscreen keyboard) since the navigation bar is hidden.
- doesn’t get in the way of other swipe actions like scrolling/turning pages/homescreen transition. I can’t think of any situation where you swipe from the bottom of the screen that would interfere with the Quick Navigation.
So developers, do you think something like this is possible? It would be an awesome solution to get the most out of the screen size and still have quick access to the navigation buttons and maybe even custom apps/actions.
If it's not possible or just plain stupid, what are the problems realizing something like this?
Lmt has pie wheel=half circle stuff in your terminology, already implemented...
Nearly two weeks late
s2d4 said:
Lmt has pie wheel=half circle stuff, no need to draw stuff
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cool, didn't know that So probably my idea is unnecessary after all
qwer23 said:
Cool, didn't know that So probably my idea is unnecessary after all
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
be happy
He's adding even more features to it too
s2d4 said:
be happy
He's adding even more features to it too
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I am! Just installed new version and it's awesome! It's pretty much what i wished for ^^

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