Re: A plea for some fore thought.... (was Re: calendar questions)

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Jim Gettys wrote:
> 
> I second the complaint...  Or rather, this is a polite request for people
> to start thinking about how things can be made to work on small displays;
> in particular, I'm thinking along the lines of PDA displays...
>

Jim, you should know the answer to this question: how does one even find
out how big the display is? Does X provide a way? 
 
Unfortunately the hooks we would need in Gtk to adapt to screen size
aren't there I don't think. Probably Gtk should pick its default font size
based on screen size, allowing gtkrc to override; but the real problem is
that there's no way to know how large one's app window is going to be. If
you did know, you could gtk_window_set_default_size() in the case where it
was too large. Alternatively, a gtk_window_max_size() could be added which 
automatically clamped the default size to some maximum. Other than that,
there's little to do; add scrollbars perhaps, reduce padding between
widgets a little...

> Time to start rethinking GUI work; nice as Gnome is, I'd also like
> some of the applications, at least, to be usable on such devices. I'm

For PalmPilot-size computing I think it actually makes little sense to use
a smaller version of Gnome. PalmPilot applications are very different from
the usual windows/mouse applications and that's why people like the
device. However the "very small laptop" category could benefit.

For the PalmPilot sort of devices, I would say the correct route is to
emphasize portability and toolkit independence in the application code.
A nice example is AbiWord - they have 90% shared code across Gtk and
Windows. So assuming you want a word processor on a PalmPilot,
it's only a 10% job to write a new frontend. Actually more like 5% I'd
guess - the "hard parts" and design work are in the backend.

For GnomeCal for example, all the file-format code, networking code,
time-computation code, and data structure code could be shared. However
you'd want to do the screen display differently or it would suck big time
on one of those little handhelds... vice versa is true as well, I don't
want some cramped touchpad interface on my 21-inch monitor.

This is the right way to write nontrivial applications anyway, since
toolkits change and people change their mind about how they want the UI to
work.

Havoc