[maemo-developers] Moving windows in Maemo

[From: Sean Luke]

On Apr 13, 2007, at 3:43 AM, Eero Tamminen wrote:

>> #2 of course might have to be modal depending on the operation.
>> But #1 NEVER has to be modal,
>
> I don't understand.  Infoprints are never modal, they don't even
> take focus.

No, you're right, they're never modal, at least from my current  
testing.  But they do interfere with operations, covering widgets  
(like the scroll-up button and thumb) and material on-screen, and  
causing a significant cognitive wait period, hesitating until they go  
away because you can't dismiss them.  If you'd like them hanging  
around that long they should be placed somewhere that has less  
effect: my top choice is the right 2/3 of the menu title bar.


>>> Note that some of the dialogs have static sizes because Gtk doesn't
>>> always handle automatic resizing well enough.  This is only a  
>>> problem
>>> with text ellipsizing though I think.  Gtk has only concepts of  
>>> minimum
>>> (for ellipsizable text="...") and full size of a widget, as getting
>>> something reasonable in between would need a lot of iterating  
>>> (slowdown)
>>> for the widget sizes.
>>
>> Why do your windows need to have live resizing?
>
> I'm not talking about user resizes, but calculating the dialog sizes.

Why is this an issue?  It would seem to me that ellipsizing is O(1).   
Size as you like, then if you can't fit everything, draw, then erase  
back N characters, or a word, and stick in the "...".  I get the  
feeling that GTK's got some more coding ickiness here.  I've already  
found another example -- try putting two TextViews inside an HPaned,  
fill them with a lot of text, and then drag the HPaned. This should  
be smooth but it's freaks them out badly.  This kind of behavior is  
unacceptably slow for a modern GUI: it looks like someone's hacked in  
a bad algorithm out at RedHat.


> Did palms or Newtons ellipsize too long strings or were they only
> available in English? :-)

Can't say about Palms.  Newtons did not ellipsize: but generally  
Newton windows were movable but did not have resize widgets (not that  
there was a prohibition against it).  But more importantly, MacOS X  
does not ellipsize, so at least in English it's not seen as all that  
important.  If it's highly costly, why not dump it?

Sean