[maemo-developers] Fremantle user interface behaviour and API

[From: Claudio Saavedra]

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 11:02:45AM +0200, Cornelius Hald wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> I'm sitting on the train and my notebooks battery just went flat, the sockets are not working because of some electricity problems (yea Deutsche Bahn), so I don't have the API nor my code in front of me. That said please excuse wrong spelling of function names etc...
> 
> I'm having some quesions about the Fremantle UI. Hopefully someone can help and save me hours of boring try-and-error :)

Just for the record, the hildon library team has moved the hildon code
to garage, and we created there a mailing list for this kind of
questions and to get some feedback. You can find it in 

https://garage.maemo.org/pipermail/hildon-devel/

> 
> Panable Area
> How exactly should I use it? I replaced my ScrollableWindow with a PanableArea, the rest of the code I left  as it is in Diablo. Inside the PanableArea is a GtkTextBox. Nothing else.
> Now, it renders correctly, that is it has only this small scroll indicator and not a real scroll bar. But I cannot pan. If I try to pan it always selects the text inside the text box. How is this supposed to work? How is the destinction made between selecting text and scrolling/panning the text?

In the particular case of text areas, panning is not really possible
since the text area will process the dragging as text selection and
won't propagate the event back to the pannable. A solution for this
involves overriding some event handlers in the text area.

You can check HildonTextView for a way to handle this, although I'd
recommend you to use it directly.

> 
> Tree View
> I changes the code from using gtk_tree_view_new() to hildon_gtk_tree_view_new(). I thought this would give me a finger friendly version of the tree view, but I cannot see a difference between the hildon and the gtk version. Also the different HildonUIModes have no effect for me.
> What is the supposed outcome? How do I get the tree view to be finger friendly? I'm using a GtkListStore as backend and the view shows two sortable columns - if that matters.

To avoid breaking legacy applications, the proper theming is done only
to treeviews inside a pannable area. If you put your treeview inside a pannable
area, you'll get finger-friendly sized rows.

> 
> Context Menu
> How are context menues supposed to work in Fremantle? If the main menu is now finger friendly then the context menu should be too I think. How do I generate such a menu? Is there API or do I just create a GtkMenuShell with some big buttons in it?

For application menus it is recommended to use HildonAppMenu. For
context sensitive menus, please create them using hildon_gtk_menu_new()
to get proper theming.

> Does this new 2-finger-tap-thing generate a normal right-mouse-click event or something else?
> 
> Changeing device orientation
> I think I read that using the device in portrait mode should give the user a simple version of the application. E.g. the user can only view, but not edit content. Also the UI then should be usable with one hand. Further it was written, that the HildonAppMenu changes in portrait mode from 2x5 items to 1x10 items. How do other widgets like the tree view react to changes of the device orientation? And is there a way to test this with the current SDK?

There's API to set the orientation mode of your window in hildon, but I
think this is not yet in the SDK. You can get a more recent version from
git:

  git clone https://git.maemo.org/projects/hildon


Claudio