How To Fix The Gallery Button
One of my favorite things about the Nokia N81 8GB was the fact that it did *not* have a Gallery shortcut key next to the camera button. I’ve had this key on every phone since the N80, I believe, and I’ve found that it’s more of a nuisance than a convenience. In my experience, this little button is activated by accident more often than on purpose, and sends the phone on a rather slow adventure to show off my latest pictures and videos.
It’s even worse if you use certain car mounts, as this Gallery button is right in the way of most of the side-arms on these mounts. Frustrating, to say the least. However, I’m very pleased to announce that about a week ago, while watching MoBuzzTV in the shower with my N95-3 safely inside a zip-loc baggy, the solution came to me….
Put a time-delay on it. Simple as that, really. Think about it. The camera shutter button is located directly next to the offending Gallery key, and is almost NEVER accidentally activated. This is because for the camera shutter button, you need to press and hold it for a few seconds before it activates the camera. How genius.
I think it would be easy to implement via firmware, I honestly don’t know. However, I think this would completely solve the problem that I’m sure everyone has faced of that blasted Gallery button activating on accident and opening that silly Image/Video Gallery.
and there was me thinking you actually had a fix instead of an idea of a fix… Misleading title! Agree with you though. Needs a firmware fix.
Maybe this would be able to be done by the user now courtesy of the 9.2 hack…Maybe.
Use an app such as Tracker or NStarter to map the gallery key to something else apart from the gallery, or to completely remove the mapping.
Nstarter does not have access to gallery button.
@ Burcrim, can you tell me how to remove the mapping? I want to play using vBag on my N73, and it’ll be really nice if I can use the Gallery button. Currently, using Tracker, I can only change the mapping to something else, and NStarter doesn’t have any access to the said button. So, removal is necessary.
I don’t think applications had access to map the gallery button, plus it wouldn’t be convenient at all to make it launch something else. Ricky’s idea is better, just put a timer on the thing, it won’t launch if it’s pressed by mistake
Actually, Tracker can be used to map the Gallery button to any other application. Of course this doesn’t help very much. I would love to stop its action while playing on vBag, and then manually make it reappear once I stopped playing. In case of general phone usage, I have hardly faced any problem with the Gallery button, so it’s not a nuisance for me. It would have been great, if someone from the pool of talented S60 developers could stop the action of the key according to the user’s wish.
I haven’t really had this problem, but when setting up my AT&T N75, I noticed that those buttons were BOTH on a delay of sorts… so, I guess it’s do-able…
Seconding the Tracker suggestion. Instead of making the gallery button useless, use Tracker to make it useful.
It could be a shortcut to a favorite app or a shortcut to the desk which has shortcuts of its own.
Jun 15th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
[...] has already gone on and off about how annoying the Gallery button is. He even proposed a suggestion to solve its problem. At the time, I had just got my N95 and it hadn’t pissed me off, YET. But day after day, I [...]