I'm sorry, uninformative emotional response and all,, but I can't stop myself.

Posted Oct 6, 2010 19:32 UTC (Wed) by jthill (subscriber, #56558)
Parent article: Rock-a-droid

so the developers have partitioned up the screen and mapped the pieces onto the arrows and buttons found on a typical old-school media player. Without putting any indication on the screen that it has been so divided.

lol. you gotta admire that. old-school ftw.

I'm sorry, uninformative emotional response and all,, but I can't stop myself.

Posted Oct 6, 2010 22:56 UTC (Wed) by midg3t (guest, #30998) [Link] (3 responses)

Apparently they weren't aware of the built-in trackball or directional sensor on most (all?) Android devices. That would have made more sense than an invisible UI hack.

trackball

Posted Oct 6, 2010 23:00 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Actually, though I didn't mention it, the interface does work with the trackball.

I'm sorry, uninformative emotional response and all,, but I can't stop myself.

Posted Oct 7, 2010 2:46 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link]

I'd guess they just wanted something working as quickly as possible. You know, change and test one thing at a time.

Android directional controls

Posted Oct 7, 2010 15:22 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Unfortunately quite a few Android devices either have no directional controller, or the one they have is only accessible when the keyboard is opened. Take a look in Google's Android phone gallery: http://www.google.com/phone/