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Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play LiveAkademy: Plasma Active and Make Play LivePosted Jul 10, 2012 10:30 UTC (Tue) by bluebugs (subscriber, #71022)In reply to: Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live by naptastic Parent article: Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live
> My laptop is *NOT* a tablet. My desktop is *NOT* a big phone. I do not touch the screen. I type and, when I can't avoid it, I mouse. One application should *NOT* take up the whole screen. Icons, titlebars, buttons etc., do not need to all be 64px tall. I have two huge monitors so I can do spreadsheets, terminals, browsers, IMs, and still have room for my task bar, date and time, notifications area, generous scrolling resource monitor, and separate 'start' / Applications / Places / System menus. (Still using Gnome 2 on Ubuntu Maverick.)
There is nothing wrong on having the same software on a phone, a tablet, a netbook and a huge ten screen desktop. The main issue is that the toolkit you are referring to is not able to provide a proper automated environment accross all different devices. That means a proper relayout of your application depending on a device theme. Taking into account the dpi to automatically scale the font and the graphics that need it without scaling the part that shouldn't. Taking also into account the variation in the input system (a finger is way bigger than a mouse pointer).
In fact, soon you realize that if your toolkit provide all of this for free, the same code will run on all your device and still feel good because it is designed to take your device into account. I believe that the main failure of Unity is that it doesn't take your device into account.
And this is not science fiction, the Enlightenment project has been working on that for years and the EFL already provide part of the solution. To make it properly work you actually need the window manager and the toolkit to cooperate...
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Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live Posted Jul 18, 2012 23:09 UTC (Wed) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
This is what QML makes possible, too (and yes, it's heavily inspired by EFL). Plasma implemented something like that without QML and now starts to take advantage of it. It's not something the toolkit has to do, the developer has to take formfactors into account as well, btw. At least to some extend - like providing a different QML (UI) file for at least 2 formfactors (say desktop/netbook/big tablet/tv and one for small tablet/mobile phone).
I really doubt you can write an UI or toolkit in such a way it can automatically adopt any UI for ANY formfactor & input method, unless you're OK with rather sub-optimal results in quite a few cases...
Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live Posted Jul 18, 2012 23:44 UTC (Wed) by bluebugs (subscriber, #71022) [Link]
I agree that QML as Edje by separating UI and code provide the same solution. In some case, it will be providing one Edje/QML file per device, sometime you can do with one. As an example of what, we can do with Edje, look at this video around 0:34 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y82SVGFvjG4 . Today it's even possible to take the finger size and scale into account, but you get the idea. It take some work and it's not always a good idea, as you may want sometime to have really different layout for different devices, but the technology provide the means to do it.
Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live Posted Sep 6, 2012 9:58 UTC (Thu) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
That is really a beautiful demo of EFL! Ok, the theme and animations continue to be - 1995 or so, but the hiding of elements upon resizing is brilliant.
How much of that had to be hand-coded? Do you have to make some hierarchy of importance of elements or so? I wonder if QML is even at this point... Doubt it, actually.
Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live Posted Jul 20, 2012 18:11 UTC (Fri) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> Taking into account the dpi to automatically scale the font and the graphics that need it
DPI isn't the thing that should be used for setting the text scale, but the viewing angle. However, that depends from the viewing distance. 10 pixel font looks really tiny on 70 DPI TV 5 meters away compared to 10 pixel font on 250 DPI phone screen viewed from 25 cm away.
Currently displays don't provide information about from which distance they're being viewed.
PS. Should the text size change when you walk closer to a (wall) screen? What if there are multiple viewers at different distances?
Akademy: Plasma Active and Make Play Live Posted Jul 21, 2012 5:14 UTC (Sat) by bluebugs (subscriber, #71022) [Link]
Yup, I just simplified the explanation. The idea is to define a scale factor and the part of the UI that are readed by the user (text, also some icons for example) to be scaled. This is to be defined per screen (not even per device as you may have a tv plugged on the out put of an phone). The way we solve that is either the configuration is predefined by manufacturer or we ask the user to pick the correct scale factor from a set of predefined one.
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