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

[famrom idecnet com (Guillermo S. Romero / unnamed / Familia Romero)]

>By convention, X applications are supposed to take -geometry arguments
>on startup, which can provide the size (these are window manager hints
>in the ICCCM).
>This size can also be set in Xt applications by setting the appropriate
>resource.  This is also good, in my humble opinion.
>Gtk should obey this convention.  It isn't rocket science, and has
>been present in X applications since almost the beginning.

I would be really nice to be able to use -geometry with all X apps, GTK, Xt
or whatever. It should be a X standar, IMHO.

>That doesn't get me alot of applications without messing with them.  It
>is clear that some applications will need significant rework; it is also
>clear that many applications shouldn't need much more than tuning font
>size and a bit of thought that it might run on a small display.  Some

Maybe GTK and Gnome widgets should be reworked a bit. IMHO, at 800*600 I see
too many wasted space, just blank. Looking at other interfaces I see less
empty space, thus you can have smaller windows and more things. Not just
font size, maybe a real "do I need a x pixels from text to button border? do
a need all this empty zone here?" kind of revision.

In lot of places a 640*480 or 800*600 screen is typical, there are lots of
PCs with 1MB RAM in the SVGA and 14" monitors. So please take into account
when doing new apps or widgets (and revise old things).

In bigger resolutions they not look really bad. But if you stop to think
that you could have more things on screen, you still realize that there is
too many empty space.

>shouldn't need any work at all (e.g. the applets in the gnome panel I'd
>expect to work as is, though a further shrink might or might not be
>productive.  I don't yet have an Itsy to play with to have an opinion.
[...]
>I agree, but I note that a toolkit that does more of this for you will
>be popular...

I know that this will start the typical "HD are cheap, monitors are cheap,
all is cheap", but designers should test things in old computers to verify
that obligatory things do not eat too much CPU, HD, RAM or screen, or
specify that programs are for today or bleeding edge computers. Late 486 or
early Pentium, with 16-32MB, HD .5-1GB, 14" monitor and 1MB video are good
computers (only 3-4 years old) that still work and some ppl can not (!= want
not, plain and simply "can not") upgrade. Portables or other new kind of
computers are in similar situation, built now, but not the best performance.

I think designers should say clearly what is their objetive, so users know
if the program is or will be usefull to them. A simply "this programs does
not run with less than 1024*768 16bit and will not" is all what is needed.
That or decide to think how to be less resource hungry, "we are working to
decrease resource requirements".

I post this form a user point of view and hope that everyone understands it,
at least bit. Flames and other unnusefull replies > /dev/null. Othervise
commment freely.

GSR