Re: [Usability] HIG proposals are bad for PDA and small screen devices

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

Hi,

Calum Benson schrieb:
> On 9 Jan 2008, at 15:21, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> 
>> Hallo.
>>
>> HIG conforming application must use 12 pixel spacing and ignore screen
>> dimensions. It sounds broken by design.
> 
> It's a known issue, but the main 'broken-ness' is in gtk[1], which  
> uses pixel units for everything, rather than a device-independent  
> scheme.  Thus we had little choice but to write guidelines that  
> assumed everyone was running on an average sized-screen with an  
> average-sized font, and choose spacing guidelines accordingly.
>
It would be helpful to have a gnome-hig.h which defines those spacing avlues or
even better move them to the gtk.rc and add style-properties. Then I could get
them when layouting my dialogs from gtk-dialog::border-spacing and
gtk-dialog::frame-spacing. When designing themes for small screen devices its
easy to adjust them. Likewise they could even by enlaged for accesibility themes.

Stefan

> 
> That said, updating the guidelines with mobile devices in mind is  
> definitely something we need to consider for the next release of the  
> HIG.  It may be that a separate or supplementary document is more  
> appropriate, though (as with the Java mobile device guidelines, the  
> Windows CE guidelines etc.)
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> [1] Or at least, it was when the HIG was written-- was this ever fixed?
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2003-February/msg00009.html
>