Some Symbian Belle Notes

Following the last post revealing that status bar for Symbian, one of our readers, Lloydo has found a few interesting things in Belle which he mailed to us. Thanks for the find!

• We now have 270° rotation
  http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Symbian_Design_Guidelines/rotation.html
• Haptics remain at the core of the touch experience, and Harmattan also implements them so hopefully all Qt app’s will have consistent haptic feedback
• All applications are expected to support theBack button. This button will step back through the app. history and eventually hide it, leaving it running and accessible through the task manager and bringing the user back to the homescreen. On phones with HW keys, pressing End will close the app. and bring the user back to the homescreen. If multiple applications were accessed in a row (e.g. open Web from Mail), then Back takes you back through multiple app. histories until you arrive at the homescreen.
• Multi-touch: we are finally seeing a rotation gesture (will make Ovi Maps 3D imminently more useful, like it used to be on S60 3rd Ed. devices!)
  http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Symbian_Design_Guidelines/touch-input-policy.html
• Application views: the interface paradigm in Belle is much more modern than previous Symbian versions and echoes iOS/Android. No more than two hierarchicallevels for menus, tabbed views are considered only as state changes (parallel views), and we now have flipped views
  http://www.developer.nokia.com/Resources/Library/Symbian_Design_Guidelines/view-navigation.html

Also, I noticed in the Zeta/700 press photo, the contacts have status icons in their top right (green dots). I hope this means system presence is available—meaning we might get unified networking like Maemo (e.g. multiple chat accounts). I really hope this heralds the integrated Skype experience promised years ago (originally for the N97). With video chat too!

Category: Symbian