Re: snap to grid feature

[Reginald Melchisedek Poyau <melchisedek earthlink net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-13 at 04:47, Gaute Lindkvist wrote:
> 
> whooah... Before an algorithm is decided upon, I think the issue on what
> kind of grid we want should be up for discussion.
> The way I see it, scaling icons into a grid sort of defeats the purpose of
> having scalable and stretchable icons in the first place.

I don't think it is possible to implement snap to grid on the desktop,
if one does not slightly scale icons due to change of available viewable
desktop space or desktop running out of cell grids.  Also scaling icons
does not neccessarily preclude icons having arbitrary sizes i.e. icons
could span multiple cells.  Also, only icons that were slightly too big
to fit in current cells would have to be scale down.  Icons with size <
cell size would not have to be scale up; Icons would be centered at
cells' centers.

As I stated before, I don't think that slight scaling is enough to
prevent icon overlaping in the following extreme cases:
	- user switching to lower resolution * 
	    one example going from 1600x1200 -> 640x480
	- user file operations: adding more file to desktop
	- user changing panel's size or adding more panels.
	    example in gnome2 maximum panel size is 128, adding four such panel
left&right&top&bottom would effectively reduce desktop viewable area by
256 x 256.

I think, that an additinal solution would have to be implemented to
handle these extreme cases.

Possible solution:
Having multiple desktop pages;	
> 	
> What we really want is a system for making icons automatically align and
> look systematically placed is it not?
> 
> What if we instead of aligning icons into the square of the grid, align it
> to the intersections? This would mean that icons do not have to be the
> same size to look correct.
> 
> I made a small mockup:
> http://www.skummelt.no/~monty/grid.png
> 
> --
> Gaute
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