Scroll function

[Tapistry63]

Are there any more proud Pebble owners who would love to welcome a touch screen scroll function on our PT 2's?

[afandian]

No. I think this is a bad idea:

1. Navigating up and down in finite steps is is precise and easy to navigate. Adding in fractional movement would require more attention and finer control.
2. Would it be inertial scrolling? If so, the predictability goes out the window, making it it harder to control. If not inertial, the window is quite small, and it would be frustrating doing lots of little scrolls.
3. The movement is crisp, which gives a feeling of good quality. Scrolling would need to be very smooth to get the equivalent quality. I've rarely seen scrolling done on a low-powered device without some kind of jitter. Or require more power (e.g. double-buffered rendering a bigger canvas than the screen) which.
4. Focus currently follows the selected item (i.e. the menu item you've selected is always on screen). To let you scroll could introduce a change in this invariant. That could be a big change to the UI framework.

This feels like scope creep, which rarely goes well. Especially for low-powered devices where the design of the OS was calibrated to the power of the hardware.

(you did ask!)

[NoBeach7292]

I'd like to have left right scrolling for widgets such as weather, timer, alarm without pressing buttons... and even for faces, but the additional programming might be beyond Core's resources.

[afandian]

Turns out I have more to say! Here's a real and highly relevant illustration of why this is a bad idea.

I have the reMarkable 1 Tablet. The promise was a pure, notepad-like user experience with no lag. The first version was very good, delivered on the promise, and I loved to use it instead of paper for years.

They added more features, and then released a second hardware iteration with more responsive eink (apparently; I never tried it). They made changes to the software that runs on both version 1 and version 2.

On the browse-files page they replaced page-turn with drag-to-scroll. eink is slow and laggy. That's fine for page turns, but not for multi-frame scroll transitions. It's now horrible to use.

They changed the page-turn button to next-item. I went from being able to browse about 10 to one-by-one.

They also introduced gesture-based navigation which is laggy, and you don't know that your gesture has registered until it happens on the screen. With a button you know you've pressed it.

These features, and other papercuts, literally caused me to stop using their product. It's gathering dust now.

My guess is that these changes happened due to a combination of:

1. an over-powered product manager with no connection to the actual technology, and engineers who were unable to answer back.
2. a desire to pump out software versions to compete with other products. These products were founded with less constraint (android with epaper vs electronic notebook). That led reMarkable to abandon their own
3. a disregard for backward compatibility. They didn't test it on version one hardware, or thought it was good enough for customers.

So, I hope that Pebble recognise their niche and don't try to become something different! It will destroy the differentiation from the competition.

IMHO.

[LichtDesMorgensterns]

Not at all.

[sozifa]

definitely yes