Re: [Usability] Gome is Too BIG..

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 14 Mar 2008, at 15:41, Dokuro wrote:

> can anyone tell me what is the regular resolution the HIG is supposed
> to work on?
> if we know that, we could just calculate the actual difference for
> smaller and bigger resolutions based on that pixel value, a pixel on
> High Resolution would be what in a lower one...

When we first wrote the HIG, the most common screen sizes in use were  
(based on the various browser statistics available online) 800x600 and  
1024x768, in roughly equal amounts.  I don't believe we had any  
resolution (dpi) statistics available. (I can't find any online now,  
either.)

While doing a simple mathematical scale up/down might be an interim  
solution, it's not really the way to produce apps that look their best  
on a smaller or larger screen.  I'm sure a visual designer would tell  
you that certain elements should be scaled by more than others, and  
some shouldn't be scaled at all.

And when you bring touchscreens into the equation, they have different  
UI requirements altogether, in terms of minimum widget size and inter- 
widget spacing.  This is why the common toolkits like Windows/MFC and  
Java/Swing tend to have completely separate UI guidelines for mobile  
devices, and I'm sure they've done a lot more thinking about it than  
we have, so far.

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems