ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Didier Roche <didier.roche@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 26/03/2014 19:26, Gustavo Niemeyer a écrit :
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Jouni Helminen
> <jouni.helminen@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > sorry, the Android "up" button in the action bar. Which is what our back
> > button effectively is, since we have no chronological back
>  From the document at [1], in the "Back" section:
>
> "After the main views of your app, subsequent views will use a back
> button in the header to navigate back to the main views. Back always
> returns to the previous view of an app, until the user reaches the
> main view again."
>
> This is a traditional back button, and in Android it sits in the
> bottom bar, left side.
>
> [1] http://design.canonical.com/2014/03/new-apps-header/
Yeah, and this statement isn't completely true. The back button on 
Android is cross-activity, not per application. You navigate when 
pressing the bottom back button an Android (unless the application 
restack itself in a new task as webviews for instance) to the previous 
activity (or fragment view if inserted manually to the back stack), 
being an acitivity of your applications or another one, from the current 
task.

What Jouni tells is true, the up button in Android app supporting 3.0+ 
(or using the compat library for 2.1+) available in the ActionBar on top 
is an "up" and not a "back" button. It will get up in the application 
hierarchy.

Example to show the difference:
You have a social application (app A) and want to send an email (app B):
- on app A, you click to "send an email"
- app B starts the "compose an email" activity

Here:
-> it you press the "back" button (the bottom one), you stay on the same 
task, and returns to the app A screen
-> if you press the "up" button (near the application title, where we 
have our "back" button on Touch), you will navigate to another activity 
from app B (and starts a new task) which will probably display all inbox 
content.

There are as well additional flags on task reset, I won't expand right 
now :)


So indeed, the document needs to be updated I guess to remove that 
confusion.
Cheers,
Didier