Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> 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).

Certainly; you wouldn't want overlapping windows on a small handheld
even it did have 1024x768 resolution.  On the other hand, whatever UI
you use at 1024x768 on a handheld is going to work fine at 2048x1536 as
well.  Making the same UI work at multiple resolutions, though, is
easiest to do if the UI implementation talks about centimeters instead
of pixels.

Man, after all this talk I'm really wishing I had such a UI available
right now, even though I've got a plain ~100dpi monitor!  I think I
could live with 50% larger font sizes in return for such a convenient
and scalable UI framework.


> 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!).

Here's a trick: click very carefully on the border of the menu, and you
can pick it up.  Surely this is a bug, but hey, it's a way :)


-Lex