I've been hoping we'll hear something, someday, maybe, about the work that these TAT people are supposedly so busy and so good at, and that it might provide some guidance in that area. (Kind of sad that RIM feels they have to stay silent about it all when they could be offering real guidance, but it looks like we've got little choice but to wait, or just come up with stuff ourselves.)
On that note, I've been thinking about bezel gestures and "help", and have a few thoughts.
One could use the SWIPE_START event to detect a few gestures that could be useful in this area.
One would be to tap-and-hold in the top bezel for a moment, or a double-tap.
Another would be swiping within the top bezel area, from one side to another.
You could also swipe around either corner, like from top counter-clockwise and down the left, or top-clockwise-around-right corner. Not so much useful for "help", but could be used for locking in the orientation or something related to that.
Anyway, for the help stuff, I thought touch-and-hold would, after a moment, highlight all touch-sensitive controls on the current screen, and then a simultaneous secondary touch on the control would show a help popup or something rather than activating it.
Alternatively, a tap (but not swipe) in the top region (detectable as SWIPE_START followed immediately by MOUSE_MOVE, with no simultaneous MOUSE_DOWN, as I described here) would highlight those regions for a moment afterwards and, again, a touch on the controls while they are highlighted would provide help rather than activation. This one would be more discoverable, as new users would almost certainly activate it accidentally from time to time, and be drawn to investigate.
I've been picturing a nice blue animated "glow" effect to highlight the controls, though obviously this could be app-specific.
Just some stray thoughts while we're on the topic...
