So after trying out the swipe feature for a couple of days now, I’d like to ask for an option to turn it off ;-). I’ll try to summarize my experiences so far below.
Now there’s still a couple of bugs/inconsistencies, which can probably be solved. I reported two of them at github already:
But there’s also other things I’ve noticed, where this mode of navigation seems more fundamentally incompatible with my workflow or habits:
I continue triggering the swipe to another message when I’m trying to use the android back gesture (swipe from screen edge)
When zooming into a message I also accidentally swipe when I want to scroll the content. (I can’t exactly describe it but something is off that I sometimes expect to scroll the content but it swiped to the next email, I think it’s mostly when you accidentally go into one directon but then over-correct and it doens’t go back to the message you had zoomed in but one further back. Well, it’s hard to describe)
I’m by now desperately afraid of any accidental swiping action because I keep ending up marking emails as read that then get sorted somewhere down in the list and I can’t find which one it was again. (I turned off my router this morning before turning on my notebook to look into TB which email was still marked unread there )
I don’t see myself ever using the swipe thing intentionally. I read emails by thread… and going back to the list of threads feels much more natural than swiping and ending up somewhere inside another thread if you swipe one mail too far.
Swiping between different message thread views sounds somewhat interesting to me though… though perhaps only because you can’t accidentally mark something as read with that mode of navigation.
I’ve managed to record a screencasts showing the problems with the swipe navigation feature I was referring to earlier. I managed to trigger it even in non zoomed in content.
You end the swipe gesture only about 5% scrolled to the previous email (and moving away from it) and yet the view moves over there after releasing. (This happens very easily when you accidentally trigger the swipe and just want to stay on the email you were on)
(Link because video uploads seem not allowed here)
I wanted to add one more thought here as well: I’m a heavy user of Firefox’ swipe between tabs feature. That works a lot better, a) it’s constrained to a specific area (the url bar) and b) it’s a lot more “sticky” in it’s implementation. There’s pretty much no way to trigger an accidental swipe with it.
Maybe K9 mail could also introduce a dedicated swipe area (makes ergonomically most sense on the bottom of the screen, though the mail header would be more intuitive instead of swiping the content.)
Something to think about maybe.
(Oh and even though Firefox’ gesture is way more contained, it still offers an option to turn it off.)
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