I've written something like what you describe Greg it's on learnwpf.com circa mid august this year.
Sent from my iPhone On 08/12/2011, at 9:39 AM, "Greg Keogh" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > ozwpf mailing list > [email protected] > http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozwpf
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