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

[jg pa dec com (Jim Gettys)]

> From: James Henstridge <james@daa.com.au>
> Resent-From: gnome-list@gnome.org
> Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 12:10:39 +0800 (WST)
> To: Havoc Pennington <rhp@zirx.pair.com>
> Cc: Jim Gettys <jg@pa.dec.com>, gnome-list@gnome.org
> Subject: Re: A plea for some fore thought.... (was Re: calendar questions)
> -----
> You can get the screen res with GDK with the following functions:
>   gint gdk_screen_width  (void);
>   gint gdk_screen_height (void);
> 
> And if the X server has been set up correctly, you should be able to get
> the real world size of the screen with the following two:
>   gint gdk_screen_width_mm  (void);
>   gint gdk_screen_height_mm (void);
> 
> With these it would be possible to work out a suitable size for the apps.
> Part of the problem would be the size of the widgets on such a small
> screen.  Maybe having a `tiny theme' for GTK, which would have reduced
> size widgets and fonts would help.

Remember, though, an Itsy or similar PDA is typically held closer
to your eyes than a monitor; the angular diameter of a pixel is smaller
on Itsy than a monitor, but less that you might naively think,
as you have it in your hand and your hand may be at 1/2 the distance.

So the biggest difference is just that screen real-estate is scarce;
think about a very small monitor, with correspondingly reduced
number of pixels.  This increases the value of each pixel, and the
amount of space you might be willing to dedicate to things like panels
or other UI gadgets...

Clearly a small theme would help...

> 
> So it is possible to take screen size into account, but I am not sure how
> easy it would be to actually make the apps resize.

Depends on the application; but applications and toolkits, to first,
and probably second order, should adapt to the space given them.

A mantra to have is: the user is in control...
		     the user is in control...

X toolkits in general have code to re-layout things to adapt to the space 
given them; this helps, but does not completely solve this problem. Having 
not (yet) programmed Gtk, I don't know its abilities in this area (I ordered 
a book from Amazon this week).. Certainly Xt and Tk both have extensive 
relayout facilities, and as you build widgets out of subwidgets, you provide 
information to the toolkit to allow for adaption.  Some things built on 
top of Xt aren't so friendly; but Xt has always had the ability to do 
relayout to adapt to resizing. 
			- Jim