You’ve come up with a quite bunch of alternatives. Maybe one thing to still point out is that the status bar can have even more items than shown on these examples.
Currently on the left there can be: battery, profile indicator, do not disturb mode, alarm.
On the right: location status, vpn, bluetooth, network connection status, flight mode, sim2 connectivity.
On worst case nearly all the items can be shown at the same time and the lists might still expand.
Any reshuffling on the order should still work on devices without a notch and the two groups with more local and connectivity settings is nice to have.
Yea, I don’t like the current clock too much but this is a tricky puzzle. Involving also volume change UI and notification banner. Having some plans for those, and once done, I’m also thinking of just making the clock bigger and detach it from the status bar.
Hm, if the objective is to wrap a clock around a circular shape, the possibility to swap to an analogue variant comes to my mind, where clockhands run along the edge of the cutout. But I don’t have the means currently to present a sketch
There’s “Parking Meter” or “Gauge” style analog watch designs which could be used - but of course look a bit weird.
But thinking along the lines of a gauge - if the notch area was designed to show a gauge, that could then show different things. Moon Phase, charging status, some weather parameters, download percentage, some system parameters like mem/cpu/…
The ‘clockItem’ item in the Lipstick StatusArea already has a Loader to switch between clock display and lock icon.
If that Loader was configurable (e.g. read the path to a QML file from dconf), we would have a plugin system for that area and people could do all kinds of things.
This topic seems relevant again since now we have actually seen the new Jolla Phone with its notch.
I think the implementation of clock under the notch doesn’t actually look as bad with the wider notch but still not the best looking thing. Hiding the whole notch with black bar and moving the status bar under it might look better but shipping that as default would be kind of a weird waste of screen space.
I was looking at some videos of the Nokia N9 and noticed how nicely it uses the black amoled background all over the UI in a way that makes the screen blend seamlessly with whole front glass and that also how the status bar kind of looks like it could fit that notch from Jolla Phone in the middle. Maybe we could find a way to fit all the status bar content to the sides of the notch someway like it has been demonstrated here already and then make make the background of that area black.
By doing it like this we could also have an option to make the status bar always active in apps too since the space there is kind of useless for apps. Then we wouldn’t have that weird look of the pulley menu line being cut by the notch too.
In older phones I liked the style and spacing of the status bar in Sailfish OS and also that it didn’t waste space from apps but these new displays are too large anyway so I think different spacing is needed.
This seems kind of similar to how some Android phones do it but the way N9 does the complete black status bar and app with white background looks nice and would work nicely with the colored background apps we have in Sailfish OS.