This question of using screen space wisely in the horizontal direction is one that came up when I was working with Kirsten last week. This question of how to best use horizontal space in the UI is one that crosscuts all modern resizable UIs. It's really a design puzzle about "horizontal space" and I'm wondering if others have found any snazzy solutions, perhaps using 3rd party controls, custom controls or clever use of standard controls.
The problem is hard to describe without a whiteboard, but try to picture a typical app window that has a busy "edit form" area with multiple groups of things like addresses, contact names, history lists, etc. Say when the window is wide enough you can easily fit 3 of these groups horizontally. As the screen widens or narrows the groups of controls will squeeze or expand and look weird. You can set Min and Max sizes but then you finish up with cropped controls or wasted space. I've been wondering about a UI technique for dealing with this problem. I first imagined creating a container control that knows the Min Max acceptable widths of its children and when one falls below its Min then it "collapses" to a strip or tab. So the container would automatically collapse and expand children optimally according to the amount of horizontal space available. You can still of course force a collapsed child to appear and push others out of the way (if possible). The algorithm doesn't seem too challenging but the hours of fiddly coding could make a nice reusable container. I was thinking of knocking-up a proof of concept, but I thought it wise to ask here before reinventing any wheels. Perhaps there are other tricks I haven't thought of. We want to avoid things like wrap panels where things start scrolling vertically, try to imagine a way of optimally using a horizontal strip of the UI. Greg
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