[maemo-developers] Aw: Re: Fremantle user interface behaviour and API

[From: Cornelius Hald]

Thank you very much for your answer. I got back electricity for about one hour, so i was able to test most of what you wrote. My comments are below.

> > 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.

I'm now using HildonTextView inside a PanableArea and panning is working fine. Hmm, the only problem now is that selecting text is nolonger possible. Are those two mutally exclusive?

> > 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.

Ok, I changed that too and the result is looking good.
Still I have two more questions:
1. Which signal gets emitted when one of the rows is selected?

2. What is the recommended icon size to use in the finger friendly version of a tree view row to match the size of the text?

> > 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.

I will try that as soon as I get back electricity :)

> > Does this new 2-finger-tap-thing generate a normal right-mouse-click event or
> > something else?

Any thoughts on that?

> > 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

One last question, how do I create a text label that matches the size of a HildonTextEntry field?

Thanks again Claudio for all this useful information!

Cheers!
Conny