[maemo-developers] Fremantle UI Portrait Mode

[From: Alberto Garcia]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 01:48:54PM +0300, Kimmo Hämäläinen wrote:

> 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).

HildonAppMenu has automatic relayout. The number of columns changes
from 2 to 1, and filters remain the same. If really necessary, you can
also have a different menu for portrait mode, hide some of its items
or change some of their labels.

Standard (Gtk) toolbars don't change, because I don't think there's
a reliable and generic way to change their layout. If a particular
toolbar doesn't look good in portrait mode because it has too many
items, it's IMHO the app -not the toolkit- that should take care of
this. The same applies to many other widgets and the whole program
UI in general (if it's going to support portrait mode it should be
designed with that in mind).

Edit-mode toolbars (HildonEditToolbar) look fine in portrait mode.
Again, if the label is too long for portrait the app can change it.

To detect screen orientation changes you can e.g. use the
"size-changed" signal of GdkScreen.

> > * Is there a function to change the screen orientation and can we 
> > somehow use this with the beta SDK?

hildon_gtk_window_set_portrait_flags (window, HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_REQUEST | HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_SUPPORT);

Berto