Lex Spoon wrote:
> 
> Ultimately, the right answer seems to be to talk about centimeters
> instead of pixels.  To be practical, though, this does require having a
> certain resolution available; 70-100 dpi is probably not enough,
> especially for text.

This breaks down at the extremes of screen sizes. For instance, I can spend
5mm or so on a window title bar without sacrificing much on my 19" monitor.
It has about a 260mm vertical size, so it's about 2% of my screen height,
and represents about 20 pixels. But the same 5mm is perhaps 7% of my screen
height on my NEC MObilePro 770 WinCE machine with 640x240 LCD screen, and takes
up 17 pixels or so because of the lower resolution. So ideally I want to see
my titlebars, etc. smaller on the WinCE machine if I can get them that way.
(yes, at 85 or so dpi it's hard to see good text).

It's actually pretty difficult trying to make a UI that works for everything
from a PDA to a workstation monitor. Overlapping windows don't work at all
well for smaller PDA's (like the Palm). You spend too many pixels on useless
stuff like titlebars.

I've noticed that there are already Squeak menus that don't fit on my 640x240
screen -- and there's no way that I've been able to find to interact with them,
as they don't auto-scroll, and there's no way to move them without dragging
either the titlebar or the move halo (both of which are on the top of the
menu!).

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com