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

[From: Kalle Vahlman]

2007/1/22, Ross Burton <ross at burtonini.com>:
> On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 11:40 +0100, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > > > I did indeed, and a semi-snark-filled article deserves semi-snark-filled
> > > > feedback.  It's reasonable.  Several of the criticisms were valid, and
> > > > I'll tweak the article a bit appropriately.  And respond later on
> > > > perhaps to some of the criticisms that I think were off the mark; at the
> > > > very least the discussion might help me get a clue.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure we'll ever get rotation.
> >
> > On my Laptop running Ubuntu Edgy, the Screen Resolution has a Rotation
> > drop-down which actually works. So I guess it's an X thing, so it should
> > be possible with Maemo.
>
> X supports rotation through the cunningly titled X Resize and Rotate
> Extension, generally called randr.
>
> The X server on the 770 and N800 doesn't support xrandr (though I have
> seen a hacked 770 X server do randr)

The X server doesn't neccessarilary have to be hacked, if you change
the framebuffer updating method:

  http://syslog.movial.fi/archives/7-xrandr-on-nokia-770.html

You will lose some performance with that though, as noted in the blog entry.

> though Daniel Stone has said here
> recently that making randr work well in Xomap is on his plan.

That would be rocking! :)

>  However
> as the hildon desktop would fall apart dramatically if the display was
> rotated, it's never been at the top of the list.

The most annoying thing I discovered when playing around with a
rotated maemo-desktop was that not even the fullscreen thumb keyboard
does anything to adapt to the screen width. That was a bit of a
disappointment.

That said, most of the programs didn't fall that terribly apart with
the different orientation. The two-paned approach most apps take just
sucked more than it used to ;)

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh at iki.fi
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