some feedback from a mobile application development team

[Dirk Hohndel]

Hi there,

I just subscribed so please bear with me if I'm going over things that
have been discussed.

Some background for context:

Subsurface is a reasonably popular open source dive log program aimed
primarily at scuba divers. It's somewhat known in open source circles as
it was started by Linus Torvalds, but for the past three years I have been
the maintainer. Two years ago we got some public interest again because we
switched from Gtk to Qt - we are now Qt5 based.

Last spring we started working on a mobile version. Early attempts were
done as part of the Google Summer of Code by a student, then thankfully
Sebastian decided to help us out and the mobile app took a huge leap
forward to the point that it's starting to be usable.

When doing that Sebastian used the plasma MobileComponents and implemented
what I understand to be the Plasma mobile interface defaults.

Right now the Subsurface team has run into a few issues with the
components (I think we may no longer be in sync with upstream which is in
part why I joined this mailing list).

a) the context drawer on some devices ends up being too narrow. We have a
patch for that

b) the shading of the icons causes them to be rendered as black squares on
some Android devices (likely because of buggy GLES drivers). Right now we
just commented out the gamma setting - I believe this has been discussed
here recently

c) the user feedback (about 25 alpha testers on about 30 Android devices,
we haven't gotten the iOS build to work, yet, as some of our dependency
libraries are causing us trouble) is very negative on the action button.
People find it very unintuitive and a solution looking for a problem.
In my latest builds I have hacked our copy of the MobileComponents to
simply disable the action button and instead added traditional three
bar / three dot menus to the top bar - this was very well received with
the testers. The context menu button (three vertical dots in the top
right corner) only shows up when there is a contextDrawer. Tapping on 
either of the buttons opens the coresponding drawer.
The Subsurface team would love to see an option to cleanly disable the
action button in the MobileComponents.

I will talk to Sebastian about synching our code base with upstream again
and hope that I can help contribute to the upstream project.

Thanks

/D