Why does the improvement of consistency effectively mean the extraction of colour?
The apps, otherwise, share design.
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Point 3 is necessary because my experience so far is exemplified by the following scenario:
- Several notifications arrive and are visible on the lock screen.
- I unlock and go to the first app with a notification.
- I spend long enough in the app that I have forgotten what other apps had notifications on the lock screen.
- I either:
a) Open every app which could conceivably have a live notification until I find out which it was, or:
b) Lock the phone in order to be able to see the lock screen then GOTO 2.
This is hugely inefficient and frustrating. One of the first principles of UI/UX design is to allow the user to accomplish tasks with as few interactions (touches, mouse clicks, etc) as possible.
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LOL 
And this will also let users who want this, to set a dark theme that will immediatly apply to all default applications.
In /e/ we trust!
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@GaelDuval Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this.
You said
My opinion is that the OS, and its beauty, is separate from the UI. The OS is hidden, and its ‘beauty’ lies in how well and how efficiently it functions. /e/OS is already pretty good in this respect. The UI is the ‘face’ of the OS and, as with real faces, beauty is in the eye of the beholder: what to you is beautiful, or ‘a great graphical interface’, may to me be ugly, or a step backwards, and vice versa.
For example, in your opinion, the Bliss launcher is an improvement on the standard Android launcher, and other similar launchers such as LawnChair, or Open Launcher. Whereas I think that e.g LawnChair is a ‘great graphical interface’ and Bliss is a bit limited and childlike. That’s fine and normal: tastes differ and life would be boring if we all liked the same things.
What would be a problem for me is if I can only use your beautiful OS by also using its (to me) not very attractive face. At the moment, that isn’t the case: I don’t like Bliss so I can easily use LawnChair (though I can’t currently uninstall Bliss); I don’t like the changes you have made in your fork of K-9 Mail, so I can install the original (though I cannot currently uninstall /e/ Mail).
Problems only arise when you implement changes to things such as the status bar, that I cannot avoid either by configuring its settings or by installing a different version. I am glad that you have taken on board the responses of several users to the changes that were made, and that there will be a way to allow the traditional functionality, including display of notification icons, to continue.
The Status bar Settiings UI in the latest /e/OS nougat build I have running on an old phone (because there is not yet a functional up-to-date /e/OS build for my ‘daily driver’ phone - I hope there will be one shortly, even if I have to build it myself 
) allows me to choose which system icons are displayed. This to me is a great UI: it allows me - and every other user - to configure the status bar UI to meet my needs, if I don’t like the system defaults.
The point of this (which has gone on a bit too long - I apologise) is that I hope, when you are implementing
other changes so that we can offer one of the best mobile phone user interface to /e/OS users
you will continue to allow /e/OS users to opt out of those changes if they don’t like them, and let them use (or continue to use) those parts of the existing UI which do work for them. ‘My data is MY data’, and I would like it if my User Interface can continue to be MY User Interface.
Thanks again for sharing your plans, and for the great work that the /e/ team are doing.
Pete
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Not ‘easily’
I suggest a compromise: Not trivial 
.
Gaël;
First off, thanks for the excellent OS. I also used Mandrake back when it came out (I might even still have an install DVD and case that I ordered to support it) and I think we even met over a group lunch once in Paris back at the turn of the century.
I started with Android when I got the Galaxy S5, and then later the Galaxy S7. I found the UI to be quite useful for my needs and eventually settled on having two or three screens for my daily widgets and apps (including app groupings), with the apps I use less frequently remaining in the alphabetical app listing where I could look them up easily when I needed them.
My biggest gripe with Bliss is that everything is just piled onto a bunch of screens in whatever order you happened to install things when you set up the phone, and any app groupings are also done in whatever order you added things to that group. So the end result is like having a sock drawer of apps, with things just a mess unless you hunt them down and drag them higher in priority, so to speak; but even doing that leaves all the remaining apps in a tangled mess of no sensible order.
Other than ‘that issue’ I find Bliss to be a workable UI, but ‘that issue’ is a big one for me because how the layout functions forms the basis of the usability. At present I’m trying the Omega launcher and it seems to address all of these issues.
I do, however, have concerns about using a foreign UI because I’ve no idea how secure it is (permissions, trackers, Guulag integration, etc.) and I’m not an Android developer so looking at the code isn’t really a solution. I trust Bliss to be secure because it’s part of the /e/ system and while I certainly use third party apps, they are standalone things and a UI is tied into everything.
So that leaves me in a difficult position. Use Bliss and be secure or use Omega and be uncertain about my security. And of course the driving reason for using /e/ is security so in the end it seems I have to choose between comfort and security. I do want to reiterate though that I can and have arranged the apps in Bliss so that my daily needs are up front, but the remaining things are outright hunt and peck when I want to find something. I guess that’s what the search field is for when swiping left, and I’ve used it for that so it does work. So I’ll just have to change the way I do things I suppose if I want the security.
Thanks again for the excellent OS. I used to have ads appear on webpages that were suspiciously related to things I had discussed with people while my Android phone was in the proximity of the conversation, and this happened on a regular basis. That doesn’t happen anymore when I have /e/ on my phone, but the person I have a conversation with still has it happen because they aren’t using /e/.
2 Likes
I’m no expert, but I think the outstanding notifications can be seen on the pull-down screen can’t they? I mean, that’s where I look for notifications and it seems to work for me.
It seems to depend on the app. Emails are shown there but not everything seems to be.
I’ve always understood it to be the case that the lock screen simply mirrors what’s on the pull-down screen. The lock screen will only do that if it’s set to do so because it’s optional for privacy purposes but the pull down is where notifications are actually meant to be held after they briefly appear on your screen.
Maybe that’s supposed to happen but that’s not my experience.
Hi,
I like the idea to have a “cleaner” top bar, maybe to see them all when we swipe down.
But do you know if it is possible to make the top bar larger? To improve the visibility of it?
In Settings > Display > Advanced you can change “Font size” and “Display size”, but I have already set it to the maximum (I have to admit that my Lawnchair is my launcher, perhaps with Bliss it is different …)
Thank you in advance
Even if it is possible, for me it would not be a good UI: I am happy to lose one line of screen real-estate to show me status and notification icons, but I would not be happy to lose two.
Maybe we could have a setting
I really like /e/, apart from the (to me) completely incomprehensible decision not to implement microG’s Exposure Notification Framework quickly.
But here I have to wonder: is there a single user out there who has to see the name of his/her network in the status bar because he/she forgets it? Is it really more important than seeing notifications that point out important things?
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C) Pull down the notification bar to see the available notifications. No notification icons, but notifications available.
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I look for that name when I’m traveling outside of my normal service area. If it’s what it’s supposed to be then I know I’m not going to get charged roaming fees. If it changes to something else then I know I’d be wise to find wifi if I want to use any significant amount of data.
Not all notifications are visible when doing that.
Yes, I completely understand your use task for this.
I admit, my post was a bit exaggerated, but still the number of those who need the notifications seems to be much higher than the number of those who need the name of the provider.
In any case, I see no reason to withhold the required information from either group. It could very well be easily configurable. The definition of what “the user” needs feels very much like paternalism (side note: this is comparable to the discussion concerning Corona Exposure Notification). On the other hand it is of course @GaelDuval’s right to design his project the way he wants it to be, as it is my right as user or supporter (or whichever role I can take) to decide, whether I want to support the project further.
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