On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Tom Gibara <m...@tomgibara.com> wrote:
> "Half-the-screen" is a conveniently simplified example just to discuss the > technicalities. Al's screenshot of the facebook app provides a concrete > real-world example. There are six possible actions, and the UI design maps > this on to a grid of 3x2 buttons that fill the screen. Though this design > might look quite bold over a large screen, I think that in the context of > this discussion, its the kind of UI that a developer might reasonably be > called on to implement; calling the design nonsensical is to bypass the > issue. > Let's take for granted that the app should do something good with the space it has for its UI. Is that to just enlarge all of the UI elements to cover the screen? You can maybe get away with this for the Dell Streak screen, but for anything larger than that it gets ridiculous. For example what happens when you encounter this? http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/samsung-enters-tablet-race-with-the-galaxy-tape/ Not saying today this is an Android compatible device (actually I don't know off-hand), but some day it surely will be. I don't think just making things large is going to make much sense for that, and it is still significantly smaller than say an iPad. So there is going to need to be some restructuring of the UI for these larger screens. A phone-centric UI with lots of movement between full-screen pages doesn't make sense on a larger screen. Just blowing up the UI is not the right approach to take. The Streak is an interesting middle-ground between a phone UI and a "real" tablet like that Samsung, but still just blowing up a phone UI is a waste. The buttons are plenty large enough to see and press without blowing them up. So how about using all of that extra space for something worthwhile? Maybe show recent friend activity along the bottom or something? That is relatively easy to accomplish, by having a different layout for -large which contains the UI for additional content. I do realize that this will increasingly become another level of complexity for developers. I really don't know which of these larger form factors will actually be the most popular -- nobody does -- so adjusting UI for them becomes fairly speculative. The general rule I would recommend is to ensure your UI doesn't break for the different screens (using the platform facilities helps greatly in this), and don't worry so much about tuning until there is more clear demand. Also I am currently working on some platform facilities to provide more help in adjusting for these new screen sizes, so I am definitely aware it is an upcoming issue, and we do plan to have more platform support coming up. Re: I apologize for a lack of clarity in my previous post, but I'm "not trying > to make trying to make fixed size bitmaps into 'a UI that splits the screen > in half'". I'm trying to ensure that the image resource with the most > appropriate density is selected by for display by a variably sized view. > In the case of the streak, the -mdpi bitmaps are absolutely the most appropriate because those are the correct size for the screen. If you want to ignore density and just pick an image based on raw size, you will need to do that yourself; it shouldn't be hard to say write an ImageView class that does something like this. I'd like at some point to also have some kind of "SizeDrawable" that does such a thing, but this behavior is only for special situations. -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer hack...@android.com Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
