[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: N800 GUI Improvements from a Newton Developer's Perspective

[From: Neil MacLeod]

Alessandro Pasotti wrote:
> Really interesting GUI in depth analysis, I mostly agree with you except 
> for the gutter being too big in scrollbars.
> 
> I feel that although wasting some space, this big gutter is useful, 
> since if it were smaller it would be difficult to use the scrollbars 
> with the finger or when the stylus is angled with the right hand and 
> touches the edge of the display frame.
> 

The only trouble is, the gutter behaviour on the 770 & N800 is inconsistent depending on the full-screen state of the application.

When an application (eg. File Manager or Opera) is not full-screen, there is a thick ugly gutter on _both_ the left and right hand sides of the application. However, when the application is maximised to full-screen both of these gutters disappear.

So, if there *is* an argument for the gutters it should apply whether the application is full-screen or not. But since the gutter behaviour is different depending on the application zoom state, the presence or lack of the gutters must be due to a poorly implemented widget feature. Given a preference my choice would be to remove the gutters from the non-maximised zoom state since these gutters waste valuable screen space and make the application look less attractive.

And to further demonstrate how buggy the non-maximised gutters are, it's possible to scroll a window (eg. list of files in the N800 File Manager) by placing the stylus in the right hand gutter - seemingly all touch screen events registered by the gutter are delivered to the adjoining scrollbar.