Re: Shrinking Gnumeric for touchscreen devices

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 05:47:57PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> The binary package is about 4Mb, so is the gnumeric-common package, making
> 8Mb. Then there is about another 3Mb of library/support packages. The fatest
> being gconf at nearly 1Mb. Giving a total of 11Mb, which is an awful lot of
> our 'flash budget'. I'm sure there is room to strip this down significantly.
> There are obvious thigns like -Os and throwing away docs, but there are no
> doubt less obvious things which I need some help from you guys to
> understand. For example it runs without gconfd present but at the expense of
> a lot of complaints about it not being able to get config info. Presumably
> something less than 1Mb of code could be implemented to get the relevant
> config settings? Can we get rid of some of the bonobo stuff and still have
> it work? 

Try building from cvs and configuring
    --without-gnome
That removes the need for gconf and most of the libraries above gtk+.
 
> How much else is modular and could be stripped down? What are the tradeoffs?
It would be some work at the gnumeric level, but you may also be
able to strip the gnomeprint depends.  It would not be trivial, but
if we make the jump to using GogRenderer (a rendering abstraction
created for charts) that would hide the gnomeprint depend enough to
potentially remove it.

> Second, Touchscreen use:
> Are there any important things that are lost if we only have left-clicks?

hmm, all context menus would be lost.  The only thing I can think of
that would be inaccessible would be editing object properties,
charts, lines/boxes, and labels.  It would not be difficult to gin
up something to supplement it.

> Also all the icons need making much bigger for sensible touchscreen use
> (which implies reducing their number - there isn't much screen space).
You could easily move several of the toolbars into menus.  The 1.3.x
series has converted everything to GtkAction (gt-2.4.x) which allows
for easy mapping between toolbar <-> menu items.

> We
> are making a lot of mods to GTK to change the default sizes of things like
> this. Do you think there is much that will need to be changed inside
> gnumeric itself, or does it use GTK so thoroughly that UI changes will
> automatically 'filter through'?

most should,  some of our custom actions and icons would likely need
to be resized.