[maemo-developers] Moving windows in Maemo

[From: Sean Luke]

On Apr 16, 2007, at 12:06 PM, Eero Tamminen wrote:

> The problem is not widgets telling what is their maximum size
> (doesn't fit to available space) or minimum size (doesn't show enough
> useful information to the user), but somehow things deciding
> what is the the optimum size for them.  Programmer just hard-coding
> the widget width in pixels is not really a solution.
>
> It's not an easy problem to solve.

So trying to understand what you're going after, I finally made my  
way here, following some transitivity in Murray's pointer:

	http://live.gnome.org/MathiasHasselmann/NewLayoutManager

What I gather here is that GTK widgets can't specify maximum size  
and, more importantly, they can't specify a "preferred" (as in Java)  
or "natural" (as Mathias puts it) size.  Okay, fine.  But this isn't  
because the problem is "hard".  It's because of a significant  
misfeature in GTK.  If widgets were able to specify at least  
"natural" sizes, the problem would essentially go away, would it not?

But to get back on track: this is essentially orthogonal to the issue  
of giving developers the *option* of moving and resizing dialogs.   
Indeed the problem will show up in fixed-size dialogs as well: just  
have the user change the default system font size.  So: why are we  
restricted to being unable to make dialogs which can be dragged and  
resized?  Why can't the developer be given the option to handle these  
corner cases himself?

Sean