[maemo-developers] Fremantle UI Portrait Mode

[From: Claudio Saavedra]

On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 13:48 +0300, Kimmo Hämäläinen wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 17:19 +0200, ext Cornelius Hald wrote:
> > 
> > * What happens to toolbars when in portrait mode? Is there some 
> > automatic behavior like showing the toolbar as two rows instead of a 
> > single row? Is it scaled? Is the space between the buttons reduced?
> > Or do we have to care about this by ourself, for example listen to some 
> > signal and then hiding some buttons or rearranging them?
> 
> AFAIK, there is automatic relayout only for confirmation dialogs (and
> maybe application menu as you said), but not much more. So toolbars you
> have to handle yourself.  The toolkit people can give better answers
> (I'm handling the hildon-desktop side).

Toolkit people here :)

Offhand, application menus and confirmation notes will relayout; banners
and picker dialogs will resize to new screen dimensions. That's pretty
much it (unless I'm forgetting something).

> 
> > * What happens to any other widget when in portrait mode?
> 
> It looks crap. That's why the rotation is not unconditional, see below.
> 
> > * Is there a signal which signals that the screen orientation changed?
> 
> Yes, XRandr signals, which are handled by GTK, methinks.

You can connect to GdkScreen::size-changed or GdkScreen::monitors-
changed to get notified and do your magic.

> 
> > * Is there a function to change the screen orientation and can we 
> > somehow use this with the beta SDK?
> 
> Yes, we have _HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_REQUEST and
> _HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_SUPPORT window properties (I think libhildon has
> convenience functions for setting them).

typedef enum {
    HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_REQUEST = 1 << 0,
    HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_SUPPORT = 1 << 1
} HildonPortraitFlags;

hildon_gtk_window_set_portrait_flags (GtkWindow *window,
                                   HildonPortraitFlags portrait_flags);


> > The HIG[1][2] is very vague on that matter so it would really be nice if 
> > someone from the hildon team or the UI specs team could comment on that. 
> > I think it would be a shame if the new device is finally available and 
> > every time someone holds the device in portrait mode, everything* looks 
> > like crap.

If you don't want to support portrait mode, just don't set any portrait
flags and the UI will look as crappy as you originally planned :)

Claudio