Re: small screens and large config dialogs

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le dimanche 11 décembre 2011 à 16:56 +0100, Bjoern Schiessle a écrit :
> I don't think that this problem can be addressed by the individual
> applications. No matter how small the dialog is you never know if it
> will fit on every screen from a workstation to a tablet.
Yes, you can know it: while normal apps should not aim at fitting on
smaller screens like phones, they should fit on 600px-high screens.
Anyway, a dialog that's higher than this limit will probably be too
complex to be users friendly (like in the Evo preferences dialog case).

> Therefore I think the problem has to be addressed on the desktop/window
> manager level. Like an application window a dialog should be never
> larger than the screen. If I think about it, maybe it even has to be
> addressed on the toolkit level so that the dialog automatically add
> scrollbars if the content didn't fit on the screen (similar to a text
> view widget).
Toolkits already provide scrolling facilities, but that's the
responsibility of applications to either make their dialogs small
enough, or to put them into scrollviews. But the latter would only be a
workaround anyway, at it indicates something is likely wrong in your
design. No need to add fixes in the toolkits when only a few
applications don't work: better prompt the app authors to improve things
where it most makes sense - i.e. in their app.


Regards