Re: Re: [Opie] strategic direction

Matthew:

> > > The app could 'sense' its environment and adjust its UI accordingly.

Cliff:

> > Seems like a lot of bloat for an app in a limited-Flash environment.
>
Matthew:

> It could be as simple as increasing default window / font / icon
> size. I expect that'd be a few extra bytes of code.
>
> At worst, an extra file describing an alternate interface - A few K.

Actually, in the case of the apps I normally run, it's not even that.
(Unless you count the fact that X itself is capable of telling
apps how big a window they get and what fonts are available and that
sort of thing.) I run an editor. It asks for an approximately 600x400
pixel window. (Actually, it asks based on character sizes, but that's
beside the point.) On the desktop's display (regardless of whether
the app itself is running on the desktop or the ipaq), it gets it. If
I drag a corner of the window-manager frame, though, it hears about its
new size and redraws itself to fit. (Almost always I will drag it to
make it longer so I can see more of the document on the screen at once.)
On the iPAQ, it only gets a 240x~300-pixel window, and it draws itself in
that. Yes, if the user-interface elements were too big to fit into that
size, I'd need to have the editor tweak its interface slightly to work
comfortably on the iPAQ, but fortunately I don't happen to have that
problem with this app.

(Actually, if the app were using the same fonts on both screens, it *would*
have that problem, but I just don't specify a font, and it uses the default
font associated with the display. That sort of thing is why X "resources"
[i.e. preferences] are per-display rather than stored in a database by
the app.)

Another example is my addressbook. On the ipaq, it asks for something
like a 360x480 window, and loses, and gets a 240x~300 window and draws
itself nicely into that. But I can only see one window at a time, which
means I have to rely on the window manager (thanks, Matthew! Matchbox
rules!) to let me switch back and forth between windows. Running the
same application against the desktop's display, it happily lets the
window manager position its windows, and although each window still looks
sort of PDA-ish (taller than wide, for instance), I can have lots
of them up side-by-side and copy and paste among them more conveniently.
(The three-button mouse helps with that too, although I already had
"cut", "copy", and "paste" commands in the editor so it just takes a few
more taps than clicks.)

The above is *slightly* oversimplified, since I actually *have* added code
to the apps to detect the size of the screen and make accommodations for
small screens, mainly to deal with the handling of pop-up dialogue boxes.
But I did that because I could and it was convenient, not (in this case)
because I needed to. Sure, xpaint or xpdf would need a lot of modification
to be usable on a PDA screen, but not every app has that demanding a UI.
I bet rxvt-aa needed very little modification, if any, and my editor didn't
really need any (modulo finding a couple of bugs just by virtue of running
it under a different window manager).

-j., who is reminded that the Netscape preferences panel won't fit on his
     640x480 laptop screen either
Received on Wed Jan 15 2003 - 23:07:25 EST