[maemo-developers] Moving windows in Maemo

[From: Tapani Pälli]

ext Sean Luke wrote:
> On Apr 12, 2007, at 1:37 AM, Tapani Pälli wrote:
>
>>> The *right* thing would be to make all maemo dialogs and notifcations:
>>>     1. Resiable
>>>     2. Movable
>>>     3. Persistent (so next time you reopen the app, the dialog is pops
>>> up in exactly the size and place you put it last time)
>>>
>>> This would allow users to adjust dialogs and notifications as they
>>> prefer.
>>>
>>
>> Yes, this is *right* thing for someone, something else is *right* thing
>> for someone else. Persistency sounds good to me, however I don't see
>> much reason in moving modal dialogs on the screen except 'just for fun'.
>
> Moving's not a big deal.  Resizing is a *big* deal.  Many of your
> dialogs are too small, or they obscure what we're operating on.  At
> any rate, the bigger problem is that existing dialogs are not
> permitted to be movable or resizable even if it's helpful to the
> developer.
>

I'm sorry but I don't see this as a problem. It's more work for the user
to start resizing and moving a dialog than just filling in the
information what dialog requests. In my opinion we have probably too
much dialogs in the first place, but I'm not the UI designer ...

>
>> Resizing dialogs assumes that they all have scrollable and resizable
>> content. Layout of the content has been carefully designed and will very
>> likely 'break' when dialog is resized unless content is packed in a
>> scrollable widget. In fact you can try this with several desktop apps
>> and see how they break.
>
> Correct me here, as I'm not in a spot right now where I can do a test,
> but if I recall, dialogs can't be resized or moved.  Why not make this
> an option, and let the developer choose it or not?  And further, have
> the windows stay where the user put them?
>

I mean try some linux distribution with Gtk programs, resize them and
you'll see that in some of them layout can change quite much depending
on the size of the window. You would get same kind of behaviour with
resizable dialogs, weirdish looking layouts + sometimes not having
scrollbars and only seeing part of contents .. of course this can be
solved with modifications to applications.

> Sean

// Tapani