New GPS Screenshots

**Cirion** · 05-08-2006, 02:22 AM

Originally Posted by 0l33l

No road names in 3d mode

That is a Destinator feature... They tried adding it in D4 but their customers hated it, because they where used to a nice and clean 3D view.

Destinator PN has the feature, but is disabled by default. This can be turned on. I have not tried ND but I belive it would be possible to add that feature there.

**GReeToZ** · 05-08-2006, 06:17 AM

Originally Posted by Cirion

That is a Destinator feature... They tried adding it in D4 but their customers hated it, because they where used to a nice and clean 3D view.

Destinator PN has the feature, but is disabled by default. This can be turned on. I have not tried ND but I belive it would be possible to add that feature there.

not that i need it but if it is possible in ND then david should make it an option

**alanw** · 05-08-2006, 10:55 AM

This looks fantastic. Just a couple of comments. I'm a usability engineer IRL so these are based on that:

1. What the others said about the keyboard. It's nice the it can be configured but it simply doesn't have enough buttons. I need all 26 letters of the English alphabet plus at the very least an ñ and a ç. I shouldn't have to remove a "t" or othe letter from the keyboard to accomodate that.

2. The line to the left of the buttons that shows the ETA, etc.: Please can you make that configurable so it doesn't rotate between displays all the time? I noticed the other day that it's really irritating (and unsafe) to have to keep staring at the display waiting for it to get around to telling me what street I'm on, instead of my ETA, number of satellites, etc. Suggestion: make it touch activated to toggle between ETA, heading, satellite status, and "auto", which would do like it currently does. Also, switch to using a symbol font with a glyph to indicate the direction instead of "NE" for example. Wingdings has this and everyone already has it installed.

3. Make the next manouver/distance indicators bigger. The screenshot shows them tiny and in opposite corners of the screen. I shouldn't have to squint at the screen to see how close my next turn is; it's more important than the map when I get close to a turn. Other systems switch to a manouver view (Garmin, Blaupunkt) or go to split screen with the map on the left and a closeup of the manouver on the right, nice and big so it's easy to see.

4. Add the direction to the distance in the POI list. Again, just an arrow is fine (like the Garmins do).

My sense is that we are so close to having an ideal solution here, if we can just tweak the usability a little bit, it's going to be amazing. And I won't have anything to complain about.

**veetid** · 05-08-2006, 11:17 AM

Originally Posted by alanw

This looks fantastic. Just a couple of comments. I'm a usability engineer IRL so these are based on that:

1. What the others said about the keyboard. It's nice the it can be configured but it simply doesn't have enough buttons. I need all 26 letters of the English alphabet plus at the very least an ñ and a ç. I shouldn't have to remove a "t" or othe letter from the keyboard to accomodate that.

2. The line to the left of the buttons that shows the ETA, etc.: Please can you make that configurable so it doesn't rotate between displays all the time? I noticed the other day that it's really irritating (and unsafe) to have to keep staring at the display waiting for it to get around to telling me what street I'm on, instead of my ETA, number of satellites, etc. Suggestion: make it touch activated to toggle between ETA, heading, satellite status, and "auto", which would do like it currently does. Also, switch to using a symbol font with a glyph to indicate the direction instead of "NE" for example. Wingdings has this and everyone already has it installed.

3. Make the next manouver/distance indicators bigger. The screenshot shows them tiny and in opposite corners of the screen. I shouldn't have to squint at the screen to see how close my next turn is; it's more important than the map when I get close to a turn. Other systems switch to a manouver view (Garmin, Blaupunkt) or go to split screen with the map on the left and a closeup of the manouver on the right, nice and big so it's easy to see.

4. Add the direction to the distance in the POI list. Again, just an arrow is fine (like the Garmins do).

My sense is that we are so close to having an ideal solution here, if we can just tweak the usability a little bit, it's going to be amazing. And I won't have anything to complain about.

1. I will look into the keyboard, but I'm not sure where I have room for 3 more buttons... Can these not be simply placed on page 2? Place your least used buttons on page 2 and change the toggle for abc to 123 to make more sense to represent section 1 and 2?

2. The line does rotate and I will make this optional, it is clickable to also rotate through the items... I will look into using directional arrows.

3. The next manuever is a LOT bigger than what you see. That is simply just an indicator, which I might remove, that is built into the map. When the directions actually come it fills the whole top screen showing you the upcoming street, distance, direction, voice prompts, etc...

4. I will look into adding an arrow to the POI...

good feedback, thanks...

david

**alanw** · 05-08-2006, 12:39 PM

That's all great David, thanks.

WRT the keyboard, if you were to switch the symbol and space keys to be the same size as the others, we'd pick up two more spaces for keys right there and I'll bet most people would be happy with that. We're already used to having more cramped keyboards on our desks! Of course I (and everyone else in Europe and Mexico and part of Canada, and all of Central America and all of South America) can put seldom-used letters on the second page - the W and K don't appear frequently in either of the languages commonly spoken here - but I think it affects the usability and professionalism of the system in a bad way. If the configuration XML will let us define those extra buttons as 1x1 or 1x2 size, then I think you could keep it as-is for English-speaking countries and let the rest of us have a couple more options.

**veetid** · 05-08-2006, 12:48 PM

Originally Posted by alanw

That's all great David, thanks.

WRT the keyboard, if you were to switch the symbol and space keys to be the same size as the others, we'd pick up two more spaces for keys right there and I'll bet most people would be happy with that. We're already used to having more cramped keyboards on our desks! Of course I (and everyone else in Europe and Mexico and part of Canada, and all of Central America and all of South America) can put seldom-used letters on the second page - the W and K don't appear frequently in either of the languages commonly spoken here - but I think it affects the usability and professionalism of the system in a bad way. If the configuration XML will let us define those extra buttons as 1x1 or 1x2 size, then I think you could keep it as-is for English-speaking countries and let the rest of us have a couple more options.

So this affects both the full system OSK and the new GPS OSK. You are saying we need atleast 2 more buttons on both?

I understand needing more buttons on the GPS and I will try to get 2 more added, or should it be 3?

As for the full OSK. It has so many configurable buttons and characters can a full professional keyboard be made with that layout? I'm speaking of non-US of course...

david

**tj!2k4** · 05-08-2006, 01:33 PM

re: keyboard

how about if you hold the button down for 2 seconds or so, you can then cycle through alternate letters?

**Cirion** · 05-08-2006, 01:42 PM

Originally Posted by veetid

So this affects both the full system OSK and the new GPS OSK. You are saying we need atleast 2 more buttons on both?

I understand needing more buttons on the GPS and I will try to get 2 more added, or should it be 3?

As for the full OSK. It has so many configurable buttons and characters can a full professional keyboard be made with that layout? I'm speaking of non-US of course...

david

With 3 more buttons a full OSK for most european languages can be made. The problem with these chars are that they are almost as common as ABC so try removing A B and C from the OSK to get the the idea of how horribly unusable it is not to have them on page 1 of the OSK.

But as said earlyer, if a letter has "multifunction", by that I mean if I press A on the OSK I will get all variants of A (all chars resembling the letter A) and so on. Then the need for having the actual int. char on the OSK will not be as big. Just look at the Character map in your windows systemtools. You will find the complete char list. There must be 20 variants of A, and there are a lot of other letters having different variants.

**Floatingpi** · 05-08-2006, 01:58 PM

I think the idea of having the 123 button cycle through other characters as well. Press it once to get the 123, press it again for special characters / international characters, press it again for abc again.

I don't like the idea of having multifunction letter like A or O.. I just think about how I enter stuff in my phone and that is a pain. Having to pause at times to enter another letter again because the system is reading it as a cycle.

**veetid** · 05-08-2006, 02:37 PM

I understand the need for 3 more potential letters on the GPS OSK dialog in this thread, but my question is whether it is needed on the full OSK. The full OSK has a lot more buttons that are mappable on the initial screen. Is a non-US keyboard layout possible with the current full OSK is the question.

david