Re: widget size independant to screen resolution

Screen resolution is *not* meant to change the size of your desktop.
Screen resolution is intended to increase quality as resolution gets
higher. This means that widgets should be drawn the same size no
matter what resolution your in. This fits in nicely with your slider
idea (which I also thought of when working on my own graphics
project).

By doing this, you need to stop applications from specifying sizes in
pixels. Pixels are low-level units and should never be needed by
standard applications. You could however specify a 'virtual pixel'
unit which splits the screen into 640x480 units (no matter what
resolution). Such a mapping would allow people to have the familiarity
of pixels and still support resolution independence.

In the past (and present) people thought that since people with larger
screens can have larger resolutions, the widgets end up being the same
size. This is ignorant, as most monitors support at least two
different resolutions.

I think all modern toolkits should have unit measurement built in.
That is to say that the programmer can input measurements in many
different units. These units are automatically converted to pixels.
Because the underlying system performs the translation, you can
support not only static PPIs for each resolution (pixels per inch o'
course) but you can also gather such PPI information from the hardware
if it makes it available. This would allow a windowing system to
display an inch as exactly an inch.


On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 10:21:14 -0300, Jacob O'Reilly <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sounds much like the scaling in .NET's Windows Forms.  Your widgets grow
> proportionately to the Windows font size setting (e.g. Large Fonts or
> arbitrary user preference.)  Works especially well when you use the layout
> mechnisms like anchoring and docking.
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Matthew A. Nicholson" <[email protected]>
> To: "Dimitrios Apostolou" <[email protected]>
> Cc: <[email protected]>
> Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2004 4:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [Y-devel] widget size independant to screen resolution
> 
> >I like this idea very much.  Of course it still may be necessary to specify
> >a more fixed size or over ride this type of positioning/sizing.
> >
> > Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> >> Hello list,
> >>
> >> sorry to break radio silence :-), I hope Y wakes up some time soon.
> >>
> >> The reason I'm writing is to express my desire for all graphical
> >> environments. Unfortunately this feature is not fully implemented
> >> anywhere (to my knowledge) but I'd love to see it in the window server of
> >> the future ;-).
> >>
> >> In a few words what I want is that widget size should be independant to
> >> screen resolution.
> >>     Actually, by saying widget I mean everything drawn on screen: menus,
> >> buttons, toolbars, tasbar, window margins, borders, title bars e.t.c.,
> >> even common text.
> >>     And by saying independant to screen resolution I certainly don't
> >> expect everything to have the same size in every screen at every
> >> resolution. What I consider fairly easy is drawing everything like now,
> >> with default size, but giving the user an option using a slider to change
> >> the "widget size". When changing this variable everything mentioned
> >> before should change size alltogether.
> >>
> >> As for the implementation, the general idea is to multiply the dimensions
> >> of everything drawn on screen (e.g. font size) with a float variable,
> >> initially set to 1 and changed with the previous slider. There is a
> >> problem with the graphics inside widgets, but can be solved either using
> >> exlusively scalable graphics, or bitmaps properly resized.
> >>
> >> The usefulness is obvious to whoever hates giantic widgets (desktops like
> >> kindergarden :-) ) and is stuck with a low-res TFT.
> >>
> >>
> >> I see this as an opportunity to creative discussion so please comment on
> >> my idea while waiting the new Y to erupt...
> >>
> >> Thank you,
> >> Dimitris
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Matthew A. Nicholson
> > Matt-land.com
> >
> >
> 
>