sideways-X and gtk

From: Russ Nelson <rn-handhelds_at_crynwr.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 16:24:16 -0400 (EDT)

Been thinking about it for a few weeks now, and I'm convinced that
only Glade is going to be our savior. The experience of gqmpeg on the
iPAQ shows that we can't expect desktop apps to port directly to a
handheld. The disparity in screen sizes is too great. And to top it
off, we have two screen sizes to support: 320x240 AND 240x320. Both
very different and both very constrained.

I think that gtk applications which are going to target handhelds MUST
retrieve their dialog layouts from a Glade XML file. Not only that,
but it must work like locales, so that they can be changed all in one
fell swoop. And if the x screen size is going to change out from
under the application, it must understand that its Glade files may
change as well. None of this reading-parsing-and-caching stuff.

On the bright side for application programmers, once they've done
that, they don't need to do anything special to support handhelds, or
any kind of constrained-resource system.

We may need a special form of the notebook widget, which uses tabbed
pages if the screen size is too small, but lays them all out on big
screens.

-- 
-russ nelson <sig@russnelson.com>  http://russnelson.com | A hate crime makes
Crynwr sells support for free software  | PGPok | it illegal to think certain
521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | thoughts.  The crime is
Potsdam, NY 13676-3213  | +1 315 268 9201 FAX   | itself already a crime.
Received on Wed Sep 20 2000 - 13:20:47 EDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Jul 25 2005 - 17:20:41 EDT