Multilingual Wave Alphabet

[AriAbr]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

No response

Describe the solution you'd like

I have been using Niagara for about a week now and I'm really liking it so far.

I have a few apps on my phone with non-English names (Hebrew specifically, though this should apply equally to any language). Currently these all get grouped under the "#" section in the alphabet wave feature. It would be helpful if the alphabet wave included non-English letters also. Possibly as an optional feature, since the wave would get taller than most phone screens in some cases.

Thank you!

Feature Request Procedure

• [X] I have read the knowledge base article on feature requests and followed the steps mentioned

[8bitPit]

Hi Ari, thank you for letting us know. I fear if we're also listing the Hebrew alphabet there, the scrollbar on the right can get too large and inconvenient to swipe through. However, for a couple of other languages, we're romanizing the app order: we're putting apps starting with Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Cyrillic characters in their corresponding Latin alphabetical sections. We did not do this for Hebrew because we think romanization for alphabetical sorting is only common in those languages but we might be wrong. What do you think, does romanization make sense for Hebrew?

[AriAbr]

Hi @8bitPit, thanks for the response. If the choices are either romanizing or leaving it the way it is, I'd say leave it. Romanizing in Hebrew is not common in my experience, and there are a few letters that don't have obvious English parallels. That said, there are phones out there (I think) that are not even tall enough to fit the full English alphabet. How does Niagara handle those, and could the same solution be used to handle non-English alphabets on regular sized phones?

[8bitPit]

Thanks for your input, Ari.

That said, there are phones out there (I think) that are not even tall enough to fit the full English alphabet. How does Niagara handle those, and could the same solution be used to handle non-English alphabets on regular sized phones? Good point; the letters get scaled down. You can check how it looks if you enable Niagara's settings > Features > "Allow home screen rotation. This approach has its limits, however. More than 20-30 characters would look extremely small in landscape ortientation.

[AriAbr]

I hear. I think it would make sense then to add this as an optional feature that users can just toggle on or off. If you don't have enough screen space you can set it to group all the non-English apps in "#". Otherwise you can set it to group them by letter. Personally, I only have a few apps on my phone with Hebrew names, so it would only add a few extra letters to the list and there wouldn't by any issue

[luxcalor]

I would love to have a small second row of letters in addition to the primary alpahbet. With an option to select wich one is primary and which is secondary.

[8bitPit]

I think it would make sense then to add this as an optional feature that users can just toggle on or off.

@AriAbr a toggle would work, however, we try our best to only add toggles settings lots of users would like to see: https://help.niagaralauncher.app/article/8-niagaras-design-principles

Why is that? It’s tempting to implement all feature requests as fast as possible, but that can mess up an app pretty quickly. You lose control of designing a good user experience. Think of a combination tree: If you add ten settings that can be toggled on or off, for example, the user can choose between 1024 states, depending on which settings they turn on. Niagara Launcher should feel polished regardless of the user’s settings; every switch makes the overall experience harder to maintain. We came up with these four criteria every new feature of Niagara Launcher should meet to counteract this.

I would love to have a small second row of letters in addition to the primary alpahbet. With an option to select wich one is primary and which is secondary.

I'm sorry @luxcalor, we don't plan to support two rows because it will make navigating Niagara Launcher harder.

[AriAbr]

@8bitPit I don't have user stats to know for sure, but given Niagara's recent globalization efforts I'd guess that there is a significant and growing number of users that would benefit from this. To paraphrase the third design principle in the link you posted, it would make Niagara more "universal" so it works in all countries, in all languages.

Regarding the "combination tree" issue - I don't know the code behind any of this, but it sounds like the ui problem is mostly solved already so this shouldn't create too much additional branching logic. Niagara already shrinks the alphabet if it's too long. This would just change the number of letters that get shown.

[marcinsmialek]

Related: #2284 - Support for Scandinavian letters

This may require some globally or user defined letter groups / buckets, maybe an option to set the primary alphabet and list its letters.

If we use like 2x more letters in the alphabet list at the edge, the popupu with the currently selected letter, which we have now, would be even more valuable. Yet, it may be not enough if font for the general list is too small.

Now, the letters near the finger nicely move farther from the edge.
If you added a zoom effect, so not only the horizontal position changes, but also size, then I think it would be feasible to have like even 2-3x longer alphabet.
It should make Niagara an option for people whose alphabets aren't derived from the Latin - like Hebrew, Greek, Russian, Bengali, and more.

Other idea, but rather as a complimentary option, might be dual alphabet - Latin (or derived) on the one side, non-Latin specific on the other.