Jonas Dressler from the Gnome project published report about the work on developing the capabilities of the Gnome Shell shell for use on smartphones and tablets with a touch screen over the past few months. The work is financed by the German Ministry of Education, which provided GNOME Grant developers as part of the initiative to support socially significant software projects.
The current development state can be found in night assemblies gnome os. In addition, separately develop assembly of the distribution of postmarketos, including changes prepared by the project. As a platform for testing the developments, the Pinephone Pro smartphone is used, but for testing you can also use Librem 5 and Android Smartphones, supported project Postmarketos.
For developers, separate branches are offered gnome shell and mutter , which collects available changes associated with the creation of a full shell for mobile devices. The published code ensures navigation support using screen gestures, a screen keyboard has been added, the code for adaptive adjustment of the interface elements to the size of the screen is included, the interface optimized for small screens for navigation according to the installed applications.
The main achievements compared to the past report:
- The development of two -dimensional navigation with gestures, which allows causing a viewing mode with a vertical sliding gesture and switch between the applications with a horizontal gesture. Unlike the principle used in Android and iOS, the GNOME is implemented in GNOME, a common interface is implemented to launch applications and switching between tasks, while Android uses three screens (home -made, navigation on applications and switching between tasks ), and in iOS – by two (home screen and switching between tasks). The implemented approach allowed us to get rid of the use of unobvious gestures, such “run along the screen, stop and wait without removing your finger”, and a confusing spatial model, instead of which a common interface is offered to view existing applications and switching between neglected applications, activated by simple shitting gestures.
- When searching, the information was concluded in one column, by analogy with the search in the desktop environment Gnome.
