x-deck and x-slide should respond to swipe gesture

[arasbm]

First let me tell you, I think brick is a very cool project. In order to learn more about brick, I started developing a simple Firefox OS app using it. I used x-slide, and then pushed to the phone -- thinking to myself: it is all going to work out of the box. Little did I know, it seems that brick currently does not handle swipe gestures at all.

When someone uses a slide deck, they expect to be able to naturally swipe left and right -- when the app runs on a touch device.

Here are two questions for you:

• what are your current plans for adding swipe gestures, to the x-slide and x-deck
• how do you envision this kind of event handling be added to brick elements in general?

And last, I like to express my interest in helping to find a solution and implement it. So, please let me know what your thoughts are, and if you are open to community contributions. Thanks!

[potch]

I completely agree! The x-tag library which brick is built upon has support for these gestures, and we should ensure these components do the "right" (expected) thing in regards to them. We're very open to community contributions :) but are also happy to implement this functionality on the way to stable 1.0

Thanks!

[fwenzel]

Swipe gestures make sense to me, though keep in mind that the strength of "x-deck" currently is the ability to pull up any card you want, by calling its show function. Going to the "next" slide (whatever that currently means) by default when I swipe would definitely not be expected behavior for me.

That said, I can see the usecase.

[potch]

@fwenzel My gut reaction is that deck would have gesture support that is disabled by default, whereas slidebox would have support enabled by default. Either way, both should definitely support the gestures in some capacity.

[fwenzel]

I like this suggestion, sounds like sane defaults. Plus they can share code ;)

[arasbm]

how about this proposal:

• x-deck would act like a deck of cards if you slide your finger you remove the top card and expose the one under it (the card under does not move)
• x-slide when you swipe, the current card starts to move and a new one starts to slide into the frame (as if they are attached to each other instead of being stacked

But anyway, regardless of what we choose as default behaviour, I think everyone agrees that the functionality should be available for both deck and slide.

One thing I want to add is that we really need "natural swipe" as opposed to just an animation triggered after gesture is detected. There is currently a serious lack of this type of interaction, and I can see it is lacking when developing Firefox OS apps. What I mean by natural swipe is one that has immediate feedback as you are performing the action.

I am still wondering what the next steps are. Have you guys discussed how to add this feature? Is it possible to break down the implementation into smaller task, so people like me can take pick a piece?

[precz]

+1

[potch]

I've moved this issue to our 1.1 timeframe.
A lot of developers use the 'card' UI pattern, but want control over the way in which various cards are displayed. Even though they all live in a flat stack, only clicking the 'settings' button should show the 'settings' card, for example. I want to enable devs to opt-in to gesture based card movement, but it would break too many existing based UIs to have it on by default.

[potch]

This is now being tracked in mozbrick/brick-deck#5.