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Whitespace and pixel-fixingWhitespace and pixel-fixingPosted Feb 18, 2011 16:29 UTC (Fri) by droundy (subscriber, #4559)In reply to: Whitespace and pixel-fixing by Frej Parent article: First look at Ubuntu "Natty" and the state of Unity Remember, not all widgets are equal. Pixel waste when showing a settings dialog is rarely important, you want clarity and the minimum number of choices possible. Whitespace here has almost zero cost. I strongly disagree, in the common case that setup dialogs do not have scroll bars and the ability to be resized to fit the screen. I don't care to count the number of times that I couldn't hit "apply" because I couldn't see the bottom of the screen. And in worse cases, you also can't see some of the actual settings. (examples: google chrome, firefox, epiphany and empathy all have settings dialogs that either have a fixed minimum size or can be resized to be smaller, but then the content isn't visible.) Of course, the proper solution is to make all dialog boxes resizeable with reasonable behavior (i.e. scrollbars) when they are smaller than their content.
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Whitespace and pixel-fixing Posted Feb 23, 2011 19:59 UTC (Wed) by mrshiny (subscriber, #4266) [Link]
I second this. I have an HTPC running on an older TV and so the resolution is 1024x768. However the fonts aren't readable (because it's a TV) so I have to make them bigger. This makes MANY dialogs taller than the screen and makes the controls go off the end where they cannot be reached. And since it's a TV I don't always have a keyboard so I can't hit ENTER.
Unlike fonts, Whitespace not easily user adjustible. Posted Mar 11, 2011 14:35 UTC (Fri) by gmatht (guest, #58961) [Link]
And I find it particularly that shrinking fonts to fit dialogs onto a 1024x600 netbook screen has little effect. Shrinking my fonts down from 12 pixels to an almost unreadable 6 pixels doesn't even come close to halving the size of the dialogs because it does nothing about the vast seas of white space that surround each line of text.
It is kind of silly that I upgraded my netbook to one with 768 pixels, not some much because my eyes can tell the difference on a 10" screen, but because it allows me to shrink the otherwise unshrinkable whitespace. I did a mockup [1] demonstrating that it should be possible to have usable buttons (etc) in as little as 11 vertical pixels including white space. If had the option of shrinking dialogs down that small even the 480 pixel screen on the original Eeepc would start being usable for most applications.
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