Make arrows optional about sgtpuzzles HOT 6 CLOSED

Actually, that was me who commented on the market - I've only just noticed you've opened a bug here.

My main gripe (which didn't totally fit into that tiny space the market gives you for reviews) was that I don't want to see the arrow keys at all for games that can be played perfectly fine via the touch screen alone - Bridges, for example, which happens to be the game I play most: I just drag away from any of the islands or tap on them; using the arrow keys would seriously slow me down. The same goes for many other puzzles where you just need to select a square most of the time. Also, the newly added arrow keys waste precious screen real estate by being two rows high.

Could you please make the arrow keys optional? I very much agree with adding buttons for the letter and number keys needed by each game, but I have never missed the arrow keys and they take up too much space for my liking...

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I will definitely be making them optional (issue #39). I'm thinking four possible values:

• Always
• If no trackball/D-pad (+Inertia)
• Only in Inertia (for diagonals)
• Never

...with the second one (current behaviour) being the default.

Having said that, they should never have appeared when a trackball/d-pad is visible. As far as I know the Milestone has a D-pad when the slider is open. Are you seeing the arrow keys even when the slider is open? Because that would be a bug, either in my code (linked above) or in the platform, and I would like to fix or work around it respectively.

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Nope, the arrows go away when the slider is open, but since that also rotates the screen from portrait to landscape orientation that also squishes any rectangular playfield that nicely fit the screen in portrait down to about half its size in landscape...

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Oh, of course, I'd forgotten about the forced orientation when the slider is open. I haven't used a phone with a physical keyboard since the G1 (I guess a relatively small proportion of phones have one, unfortunately).

Anyway, you can see the current plans above. One further idea I had today, as a further modification of the default/auto mode, is to try to take into account the tile size of the current game, trying to work out the physical size on the current screen, and then guess whether the tiles are too small to easily hit with a finger, and show arrows if they are.

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Nearly ready to release, in commit 020d6ad (not including the tile size idea).

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Released in 9306.6, going to Market now.

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