[maemo-developers] Fremantle UI Portrait Mode

[From: Cornelius Hald]

Grrr.... I should have just waited for another couple of hours :D
Thanks Kimmo, Berto, Claudio and Hendrik for answering my questions.
They rendered this mail quite useless. Well, maybe at least the
screenshots help someone to get a feeling of the problems he/she will
have to face when implementing portrait mode.

So long!
Conny



On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 13:22 +0200, Cornelius Hald wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 19:03 +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> > > * Is there a signal which signals that the screen orientation changed?
> > 
> > Application needs to specifically request portrait mode with a window
> > property (I guess there's some API for that), otherwise window manager
> > uses landscape mode for the application window.
> 
> In the beta SDK there seems to be no API, but when looking into the git
> version of hildon I can find some stuff. The last time I was checking I
> somehow missed that. But a grep for "portrait" revealed some places. The
> function seems to be hildon_gtk_window_set_portrait_flags() in
> hildon-gtk.c.
> 
> > App can listen to standard XRandr messages for this transition if
> > it wants to, but it's not necessary.
> 
> Ok. Originally I was thinking that XRandr will not be used. I thought
> that this would happen on toolkit level - but don't ask me why ;)
> 
> > > * Is there a function to change the screen orientation and can we 
> > > somehow use this with the beta SDK?
> > 
> > It's just a question whether your distro's Xephyr version has XRandR
> > enabled.  It should.
> > 
> > Then just use "xrandr -o <left/right/normal>" for Xephyr's display.
> 
> I did that, and yes, it rotates the screen :) Here again I was aware of
> XRandr but thought that it will be implemented on top of something like
> clutter to have nice transition effects and stuff... So I was not
> thinking about the obvious.
> 
> After rotating everything looks ok, but when clicking around I realized
> that only the visual content is rotated. Mouse clicks are still handled
> like the screen is not rotated at all. For example to close a window I
> still have to click the top right corner of my Xephyr window instead of
> the top left corner where the close button is drawn.
> 
> I figured that I have to set those window properties somehow, so I
> checked the newer hildon code and came up with the following code:
> 
> static void
> set_flag(GtkWindow *window, const gchar *atomname, Atom xatom, gboolean
> flag) {
> 
>   GdkWindow *gdkwin = GTK_WIDGET(window)->window;
>   GdkAtom atom = gdk_atom_intern(atomname, FALSE);
> 
>   if (flag) {
>     guint32 set = 1;
>     gdk_property_change(gdkwin, atom, gdk_x11_xatom_to_atom(xatom), 32,
> GDK_PROP_MODE_REPLACE, (const guchar *) &set, 1);
>     } else {
>   gdk_property_delete(gdkwin, atom);
>   }
> }
> 
> static void
> set_portrait_mode(GtkWindow *window, gboolean portrait)
> {
>   set_flag(window, "_HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_SUPPORT", XA_CARDINAL,
> portrait);
>   set_flag(window, "_HILDON_PORTRAIT_MODE_REQUEST", XA_CARDINAL,
> portrait);
> }
> 
> But calling that didn't make a difference. So either the code is wrong
> or the window manger in the beta SDK doesn't know about those
> properties.
> 
> 
> So next, just tried to create a Xepyr window with portrait dimensions,
> but without rotation by calling:
> Xephyr :2 -host-cursor -screen 480x800x16 -dpi 96 -ac
> 
> The result was much better working, unfortunately the UI didn't adopt
> much to the new dimensions. The only widget that I use which really
> adopted it self, was the AppMenu. The AppMenu shows the buttons in one
> column instead of in two. But the Filters are still in one row, leaving
> them almost no space at all.
> 
> Here are some screenshots:
> 
> The main window (toolbar cannot show all items - small arrow is added)
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/conboy_note_window.png
> 
> A click on the arrow brings up a not finger friendly menu:
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/conboy_toolbar_portrait.png
> 
> A click on the delete button brings up a crippled dialog:
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/conboy_delete_dialog_portrait.png
> 
> The AppMenu looks nice, only the Filters get crippled:
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/conboy_style_menu_portrait.png
> 
> The search window looks as expected:
> http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/conboy_search_window_portrait.png
> 
> 
> I think I did my homework ;) Could now please someone how made the specs
> comment on whether this is the expected behavior or not? 
> 
> Thanks!
> Conny
> 
> 
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