ditch the "home" button?

[JimmyTheSaint]

I appreciate your adding the home button at my suggestion, but at this point I should report I'm finding it virtually useless. So, unless other people have become attached to it, maybe it would be best to reclaim that space for some other function. The problem is that it needs to be available in almost every context or else you end up having to memorize when it will be available. Since I'm not likely to memorize that then instead of guessing whether or not it's going to be available, I just end up hitting the back button multiple times anyway. I mean, if I first go for the "home" button and then find it's not there, I have to hit the back button to return to where I was, so that's a two-stroke penalty for not finding the home button.

For example, the home button is never available when you're in settings or in the flashcards module--two contexts where I really, really want to be able to shortcut directly back to the top.

Another annoying example: if I open a pop-up by pressing a character inside a definition, the only way to get back to the top is to hit "back' twice, then manually enter the entry window. That's three strokes required to get out of what it only took one stroke to get into. Again, that's a context where I frequently really, really want a home button.

So at this point, due to so frequently finding myself in a context where a home button is desired but not found, I've been trained through negative reinforcement (two-stroke penalty) to never even attempt to go for the home button. I'd truly love some kind of "shortcut to the top" function, but unless it's persistently available, it would unfortunately be better to ditch it completely, at least in my experience

 

[mikelove]

So at this point, due to so frequently finding myself in a context where a home button is desired but not found, I've been trained through negative reinforcement (two-stroke penalty) to never even attempt to go for the home button. I'd truly love some kind of "shortcut to the top" function, but unless it's persistently available, it would unfortunately be better to ditch it completely, at least in my experience

We'd actually been thinking about eliminating it anyway now that we're adding a Dict Launcher app - on most phones you can set things up so that it only takes two buttons to launch a frequently-used or bookmarked app, and I was never wild about shoehorning this function into what's supposed to be a context-specific menu. In general 2.3.8 should behave more like the dictionary / flashcards / reader / etc are separate apps rather than a single one for launching and task-switching purposes.

 

[JimmyTheSaint]

I've finally achieved the long-desired universal home button functionality with SwipePad. From any context, I do a thumb swipe to the Pleco app that I've loaded into one of SwipePad's slots. This works great and is really convenient. I guess it's the equivalent of going to the home screen and pressing the Pleco app button. So whatever you end up doing with the launch behavior, please don't lose the way Pleco works with SwipePad.