On Wednesday 15 January 2003 04:07 pm, Jay Sekora wrote:
> 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.
*nod* Many X apps are good at adapting to screen size, but that wasn't the
point I'd hoped to make. An example:
On my desktop, I use vi.
On my iPaq, I don't. Why? vi is a very efficient keyboard-driven editor.
The iPaq has no keyboard.
Could a version of vi be written that would provide me with stylus navigation
and buttons if it were on the iPaq, and hide them elsewhere? Probably.
Would it be larger than just vi on the desktop, and larger than just a
stylus-driven editor on the iPaq? Probably.
This example is extreme (as vi isn't traditionally even GUI) but it's extreme
to make a point: certain types of applications cannot simply adapt to the
screen size, there's more to it than that.
While an app can be written to run on both a keyboardless palmtop and on a
mouse/keyboard/monitor X server, it'll often either wind up sporting two
interfaces or a compromise interface that's not ideal in either place (think
Java). I'd rather see a ./configure-time flag to choose one than have the
bloat in both.
-Cliff L. Biffle
Received on Thu Jan 16 2003 - 00:21:35 EST
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