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.
Uglification everywhere. Just think of what happened to KDE…
Hi!
Fun fact : I try to create an account with my @e.email, it says me that it’s not a valid email 
First of all, thank you for your hard work! /e/ is really a good OS, it is/will be proposing lots of good functionalities, and make privacy accessible to whom want it to be back, without a big loss of functionalities compared to Android/IOS.
I backed and follow the project since the beginning and if I can’t use e/OS as my main OS for many reasons, from my point of view, bliss launcher could be one of those. Bliss launcher has lots of good features, but why is it a copy of IOS with all its limitations (where is the app drawer?) Even IOS steals features to Android at each of its updates. For me Bliss Launcher is in contradiction with your will to propose a good UI/UX. From an external point of view, it could nearly be seen as a counterfeit of IOS UI.
A part for this point you really have done a great job on degoogling Android, help to monitor privacy, allow selfhost account, promoting PWA, … I hope e/OS will find its path!
I haven’t used iOS since the iPhone 4S so I don’t know what it looks like these days. But as I recall there was no app drawer and as you point out, there isn’t one on Bliss. I have an earlier post on this thread stating that the missing app drawer is my biggest complaint with Bliss but I didn’t connect it to an iOS cloning effort. However, the screenshots of ‘improved’ Notes, Calendar, and Contacts made me immediately think of iOS. I also found the bleaching of the UI that seems to be proposed to be unfortunate. Why not just make the entire screen white and walk around in a black turtleneck telling everyone it’s great? There were many innovations done by Apple over the years, but they also had some serious problems that they wouldn’t acknowledge and if you pointed them out their legions of acolytes would shout you down. Some things haven’t changed in San Francisco.
I started coding on a Honeywell green screen terminal using a Multics mainframe and after that came a 486 PC running Windows 3.1 so I came to quite like colors in my UI experience and I like to see textures there too. Unfortunately when Apple switched their UI from something pleasant to look at to something flat and featureless all of the fanboys in Silicon Valley wanted to copy it and now the look has infected everything. Many times I’ve found UI features that are close to useless in the real world but probably look just fine on high end developer screens in an office environment (I’m including the PC world here too).
Aside from writing my own launcher and themes there’s not a lot I can do about it. It’s been decades since I wrote code so I’m not about to do that. Instead I just look for the least bad thing out there and try to use that. Programmers seem to have an ‘ugly’ thing going on in their perceptions of attractiveness these days. Personally I think there’s a connection between that and what’s been happening to places like San Francisco on the culture front so I’m not surprised. The people running organizations like Guulag want a world with no borders and only shades of grey so that spills into their vision for a UI also.
There are quite a bunch of widgets I used on Fairphone II Open OS and which I’d like to continue using. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the Bliss launcher provides only one single screen for all widgets?
That’s a no-go for me. Even if I can scroll down in that screen to see all of them - that completely “breaks” the purpose of widgets. IMO that purpose is to display information when looking at a screen - without any other interaction needed (and then - if it makes sense - start some action by interacting with that widget).
I don’t know which percent of Android users use calendar widgets. I bet it’s more than 50%. Mine displays a month¹ and uses a complete screen so that - for each day - I can see from colored bars etc. if the day is “free” or if there is a/some task/appointment/… connected to <foo> scheduled already. If I’d have that on the top of the Bliss “widgets-screen” access to all other widgets would need me to swipe down (maybe a few times) until I found the widget(s) or if it passed by (unseen) swipe up more slowly again…
Some widgets I use are clock widgets, a widget changing the CPU governor / volume / display brightness / power mode and so on - some of them only use two tiles or just one. In many launchers you can e.g. put those on a screen chosen by the user, for example all desired hardware influencing widgets. You know which screen that is (e.g. the first one on the right) and it’s easy to precisely navigate to that screen - at max one tap and one - long or short, fast or slow, it doesn’t matter - swipe to the left. I like to have the most important widgets on the main screen, the “only” important ones on the second and so on. It’s a difference if you have a continuous list of widgets where you need to pay attention for how long or fast you do swipe in order to have a 1x1 tile widget (that shows the battery status) displayed or to know it’s for example two swipes ( screens ) away.
¹ Apart from that I use another that shows a list with the events from today on in 4x2 tiles. I like to have that one on the main screen!
So, now I’m almost finished complaining. 
Really interesting is: what’s the reason(s) for having only one screen that can contain widgets?
Just in case: what (works, is OSS and) comes closest to what I’d like to have is “Launcher3”.
Apart from displaying widgets the way I like it doesn’t create micro-icons for app starters in a folder/container. I find it hard to look at approx. 2x2 mm sized tiny icons and recognise what app they belong to - especially if they are black and white. Admittedly I might be a bit spoiled from how Fairphone-II Open OS or the Resurrection Remix launcher displays containers contents. You can see at least the first entry of a container/folder and get - if chosen right - a good hint what apps will be accessible in that container.
Another question, I’d like to put the weather widget at the very bottom of the widgets screen. How do I change the order of widgets?
And this is a bug for me: If I have so many widgets that I have to scroll down then the little white circle of the main navigation buttons (which are: filled triangle / circle / square) is placed on top of the edit button - so edit isn’t accessible anymore because a tap on it makes the GUI jump to the main screen (that’s what the circle button is for). As well I don’t know how to remove a widget but I’m afraid that you need the edit button for that.
Anyhow, respect for making the Bliss launcher!
I don’t like Bliss much either, but it’s really straightforward to install a different launcher (from Apps, Aurora Store or F-Droid) which does have space for widgets, an app drawer. I have used Open Launcher and LawnChair, and both are fine.
That’s one of the great things about Android and it’s derivatives: if you don’t like something, here’s almost certainly an alternative that you will like
I think it’s a good thing not to have an app drawer. /e/OS aims to be something simple for everyone, not only tech-savvy people, and an app drawer is complicated for a lot of non-technical users.
So the launcher has to be something simple by default, and advanced users can change it very easily. Everybody should be happy with that 
Everybody should be happy with that
That’s always the question when talking about a GUI.
I can’t remember when I used the App Drawer (I have one) or if I did ever use it and I also don’t need app folders at all. I have four screens, each filled up to 70%, not more. I always thought if you need more there’s probably something wrong (too many senseless apps installed and never cleaned up). But it seems that many people have this by whatever reason and I would never reproach them because of this. They need to manage this situation and so it would be a good idea to give them some handy tools for doing this.
I always thought if many people say X is a hardly needed feature and other people say X is just crap so it would be good to have an option for X. So you can use it or not, it’s your decision, not the one of the GUI designer. It’s also a good idea to have a product with reserves. All the things tend to grow and someday you will need something yourself you can’t imagine today.
Big companies (I mean Micro$oft) did a lot of mistakes in history patronizing users, especially in their GUIs. Remember the removal of the Windows start menu in Windows 8. Two years later they advertized with “All good things begin with a start menu!” thinking again their users are idiots. Think about the idiotic Ribbon bars - scientists have even measured the loss of productivity (some say -35%). In Windows 10 you can’t even change the GUI font (of course you can, but you must manipulate the registry). Not good at all.
I don’t think that the last sentence is ever possible until this world exists. You can inspire many users to feel good with some features, but not all of them. Maybe doing a survey might help to get enough feedback to really improve application or system so most of the users who took part in such survey could feel better after the improvement.
Try a survey and you might be surprised how “colorful” results it might produce. I mean reliable survey that most of eOS users know about it and take part in voting…
Hi Gael,
I am looking forward to seeing UI improvements even if I am ok with the current one.
You have written about Bliss Laucher. As I want to use /e/ default apps as much as possible and want to consider /e/ as a fully operational system I am using Bliss Laucher. But you haven’t mentioned problems with Open Weather Map unremovable widget.
Could you tell more about this ?
Thank you
hello,
I hope that you will uniformize, (or 'merge") the contacts too in nextcloud, so that the mail contact’s list would not be different from the contact app one’s.
If you could integrate sim contacts in agenda as “/e/” contacts, that would be cool too.
Regarding the user interface, there are two major points that need to be addressed as soon as possible:
Firstly to be able to place the icons where we actually want them on the screen. As of now it is extremely difficult to only move them where we are allowed to.
Secondly to be able to remove the widgets we don’t want (weather widget).
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In my opinion one thing has not really been addressed until now: the way you terminate a running app.
The square button leads to this ominous card stack. There you must understand the surprizing arrangement of apps because oftenly you see more apps than expected. At first glance you can’t even say how many apps are there because they have all the same width. And even when you found the app you wanted to close you must wait a few seconds on the x to appear - why??? In my opinion the Close-all-button above is an expression for that fact that many people don’t need this card stack but a tool to manage it somehow. I don’t like this entire card stack screen at all.
Why isn’t there just a fourth symbol in the bar at the bottom, a simple x? The place for this symbol is free on absolutely every phone. You press this x and the app is gone and you can rely on that. And when there was another app in the background it gets activated automatically.
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A fifth symbol would also be good - a triangle arrow to the right. This symbol should just switch to the next currently opened app. Tapping this symbol multiple times could simply iterate over all open apps in a cycle without closing one.
This would be two very simple things giving the user a much better control over the currently running apps. I could also say some words about the triangle to the left but I don’t want to draw it out here.
You can swipe an app to the side to terminate it.
To switch between recent apps, doubleclick the square button.
No.
Ah. But who knows this? Is there any other button in the system which has to be “double clicked”? This entire bar needs a revision.
Not for me. I am used to the way it works and, for me, there is no need to change it. If any changes are made, they should be optional
Sure the swipe to the side doesn’t work? Click on the square button and swipe the app away. Either side works. No need to press the X.
This and the double-tap on the square button should both be native Android features as far as I know.
In the latest versions I have (Android 10 I think) you close the apps by swiping upwards, not to the side
Yes, now you say I should swipe the square button. But who can guess this?
May be you know that, I didn’t because I never had an Android before (for many good and serious reasons).
Swiping and double pressing a button or a symbol on a bar are both intransparent, not self explaining, idiotic actions and arguments on my side of the discussion. The problem is: nobody can guess these operations. A swipe moves normaly something from one place to another, who should expect terminating the app? Such important, always visible operations must be intuitive and absolutely self explaining. So, on what other actions does this ridiculous button also react - moving in circles, shattering, spoken words, breathing on???
I know very well how this comes, I’m a developer myself for about 30 years – the need of features (or just the imagination of needed features) is bigger than thinking about the user and the ergonomy and usability of the software. The user is far away when development takes place, so let’s just do it and think about later. And when we did it let’s do the next cool thing (this means: skip the thinking) and then the next. This is fatal for a software but quite common.
If /e/ wants to be better than Android it should provide an intuitive 5-button-bar having an additional x and >. The user should have the possibility to choose if he wants 3 or 5 buttons.
Update: No, I can’t swipe the square button. I checked this now. Swiping (in all directions) does nothing (good so!) But I detected that holding the finger on the sqare button causes a reaction … And also double tapping does not work in every case (I guess it depends on the app). Take the Clock app for testing.
Hello,
I will soon get back a “/e/ OS ok” phone, so I was wondering if new interface was still an idea/a project or is it now implemented in latest builds ?