Re: [Usability] Gome is Too BIG..

["Matthew Nuzum" <newz bearfruit org>]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 1:32 PM, Dokuro <dario soto gmail com> wrote:
> the compact theme worked great, still it is also the developers fault,
> not to make things better or leave a bunch of configuration options so
> the user could re-arrange things....

It's not so clear cut. There are three types of displays and they each
need to be addressed separately:

* Normal displays, i.e. aprox 100dpi with a width & height of 1024x768 and up
* Hi dpi displays greater than 100dpi (I've seen 140 dpi a number of
times) with a width & height of 1024x768 and up (but often much higher
than this, likely in the 1080p range)
* Small displays, with a res of 75 - 140 dpi and a width <= 1024 and a
height <= 600

(that last category is probably too broad)

Designing a non-trivial user interface that looks and works well on
all of the above is very hard. Writing guidelines for creating a UI
for such broad screen sizes is also very hard.

Taking small displays out of the picture and creating a UI or
guidelines for just the first two types of displays (normal and high
dpi) screens is challenging enough.

Distributions who want to cater to smaller screens should probably
create a customized desktop experience catering to this specific
audience. (IMHO) Desktop users with < 1024x768 displays are in the
extreme minority and there probably needs to be special discussions to
create a GNOME desktop experience that meets the needs of handheld
devices. I'm not in love with sugar but the developers were wise to
recognize that there would be special UI needs for the devices it was
targeted at.

This problem is going to come up more and more. Laptops with 1440px -
1680px wide 14"/15" displays or 1680 - 1920px wide 17" displays are
readily available and generally neglected (i.e. the desktop is hard to
use). I expect a wave of hand held devices such as cell phones and
PDAs to come soon.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode