On 13 February, 2017 - Willem Ferguson wrote: > I am making myself singularly unpopular by asking the following > questions. This is because I did not see the original discussion on > the topic of the Android development path for Subsurface. My > comments come from an hour or two I played around with the full > Subsurface-desktop on an Android phone while in the waiting room of > a hospital, tending to sick family this weekend. Previously, I had > downloaded a dive log onto the phone as per previous correspondence. > For me, it felt like the full desktop implementation on Android was > almost usable. The dive trips are organised, can be expanded. If one > is prepared to use the MainMenu->View path, one can fairly smoothly > switch between info panel, profile and dive list, the statistics are > calculated, importantly the dive ceiling is calculated. In short, > there is quite bit of functionality in there, even taking into > account the ridiculously small screen of the phone. > > Then I thought of running this on a tablet, but as far as I can make > out the screen resolution on tablets is much less (e.g. 800*1200, > though I see some of the state-of-the-art tablets have 1600*2500) > than on phones (1440*2560 on my phone). So having a 10" tablet is > not really gaining a lot except a larger display size, but not > necessarily more information being displayed. > > Question 1. Am I therefore correct that available mobile screen > resolutions are too low to run the full Subsurface effectively, even > with a 10" tablet?
Subsurface is resonable usable on 1024x768 screen, so I see no real issues in getting the desktop ui to run well on a tablet. The real issue is to get a UI that works on a phone. There are some scalability work which we should do, both for supporting really high dpi screens, which can probably be leveraged in a desktop touch mode to. There are no real technical issues in running the desktop ui on a Android tablet. > The full Subsurface on Android has several features that have not > been incorporated into Subsurface-mobile, e.g. the calculation > within each dive, e.g. the dive profile, setting GF's etc, full > details on equipment. These options are currently not even foreseen > in the immediate future. If one eliminates the View->All possibility > which is just too much detail for a small screen, the interface > becomes semi-workable. > > Question 2. What were the reasons at the outset that determined that > at totally new UI be developed, rather than trying to adapt the > existing UI to a small screen? Effective use of the UI would require > mobile elements such e.g. dragging of screens as in > Subsurface-Mobile. I am convinced that there were impeccable reasons > for the decisionmaking, but because I am naïve about those I remain > curious. In the initial port to android there was only the desktop ui. This was 3 years ago, and it ran, but looked like shit and wasn't usable. Qt have matured since, and we have done at least some dpi independence work. Last time I tried to use the desktop ui on a phone it sucked as usual, because trying to hit a tiny slider with my sausage fingers is hard. That doesn't mean it can't be improved, but it will never be a good experience. Design for touch and design for traditional desktop are different. Yes, they can be sort of combined, but usually they just end up being windows-8-ish. //Anton -- Anton Lundin +46702-161604 _______________________________________________ subsurface mailing list [email protected] http://lists.subsurface-divelog.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/subsurface
