The Clear Button.


The combination "carrier name and clear button" section in the notification bar has always bothered me. 
1) It’s a waste of space, especially in landscape.
2) It’s pointless carrier branding.
3) It’s bad ui.

1 and 2 you probably agree with, but #3? Bad UI?
Yes, bad UI. The best way I can explain it is in picture form:
Couple caveats: The biggest being distribution. If you want this I really have no easy way to get it to you. I modified framework-res.apk, and everyone's is different. So if you have the exact same setup as me (A Droid running CM6.1 RC5) you can have this. If not it would have to be ported over.

The second problem is that I had to kill the default keyboard in order to make this look good. The grey bar that says "Notifications" stops at the edge of the button, so I had to make a custom button with the grey background behind it. ANYTIME I try to add a new file to the framework I get boot loops (Please contact me if you can help with this). I had to edit an existing file, and nobody uses the stock keyboard.

With all those problems it's more of a proof of concept than anything. But if you really want to try running it, here's the framework-res.apk. it will probably blow up anything that's not a Droid on CM6.1 RC5.

And for the smart peeps out there, here's a zip of what I changed.

4 comments:

  1. I dunno about number 2, when I'm in different countries it's useful to know which mobile network I'm connected to.

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  2. I think you should fork CM6 and put this change in and send a pull request. I dig it.

    As far as Andy's comment, perhaps it could be made into an option.

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  3. Looks pretty good. The process fearphage outlines above has changed--you'll want to use repo to submit the change to review.cyanogenmod.com. Move the clear button and make the carrier name optional, since some users may need it to indicate roaming. You'll need to add a setting in the CMParts package for that.

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  4. so if this f'869s up my phone i can just uninstall right? should i do a backup before?

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