Small screens [LWN.net]

Small screens

Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:46 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I am playing with Fedora 15 Alpha's default Gnome 3 environment on a EeePC 701. So far the biggest problem with Gnome 3 for me is that it does not play well with small screens.

The EeePC 701 has a very small screen (800x480 according to xdpyinfo), and a lot of dialog boxes are taller than that (or in the case of disk utility, wider too). One frequently has to alt-drag and resize dialog boxes to be able to see their bottom parts. One place where Gnome 3 is better is that it by default has a single space-wasting horizontal bar, instead of two.

But one place where it is much worse is that modal dialogs seem to be "stuck" to some place in the screen and unmovable (and their top is not even near the top of the screen, there is a lot of vertical space wasted). So, if a modal dialog is too tall, the only way you can change things on the lower part of it is by blindly using the keyboard.

The activities screen is another place which does not play too well with this screen size (the categories list gets almost cut off, and the fifth "dock" item is hard to click due to the shaded "bar" in the bottom being in the way).

Other than that, and the missing shutdown option ("fixed" by configuring the power button back from suspend to shutdown, since I mostly shutdown by pressing it followed by enter), it is working fine so far.

to post comments

Small screens

Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:43 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (2 responses)

Can you file a bug in our bugzilla? http://bugzilla.gnome.org/, choose the gnome-shell component

Small screens

Posted Mar 17, 2011 0:20 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (1 responses)

Will do, probably this weekend. That is the reason I am playing with an alpha release, after all.

Small screens

Posted Mar 31, 2011 0:43 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

Better late than never.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646287
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646289

Small screens

Posted Mar 16, 2011 12:31 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Hang on. We're told that the reason for all this redesigning is to make GNOME 3 nice to use on devices with small screens... but this makes it seem like nobody is doing any testing on such devices!

I find this conflicting evidence very conflicting.

Small screens

Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:20 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

No, that is not the reason for the new design. The principal ethos behind the new design is managing distractions (notifications) and making it easier for users to find things (applications, windows, files).

Small screens

Posted Mar 17, 2011 1:28 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

the last point of the goals of Gnome Shell, as stated here:

"Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind".

emphasis mine.

Small screens

Posted Mar 23, 2011 1:13 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link] (3 responses)

> But one place where it is much worse is that modal dialogs seem to be "stuck" to some place in the screen and unmovable (and their top is not even near the top of the screen, there is a lot of vertical space wasted). So, if a modal dialog is too tall, the only way you can change things on the lower part of it is by blindly using the keyboard.

That's awful, to be sure, but one thing I personally find horrifying is that there are modal dialogs. Isn't it basically stated in the GNOME 2.x HID guidelines that if you (as an application developer) are thinking about making your dialog modal, you should stop and rethink, as they are never the right idea?

Modal dialogs are part of what makes Microsoft Windows unusable as a desktop environment. I have to work with Windows almost every day at work, due to some specialized (and closed-source) applications we use in our field.

I used to give Windows the benefit of the doubt, saying "well, I haven't used it since Windows 95. It can't still be that bad - surely they've made SOME strides in usability?" Then I got a job that involved actually working with it. Wow. Was I ever wrong.

I can't begin to describe the little frustrations that come into play every single day. They become less surprising after a while, but I can tell they're still just as irritating by how tight my back and neck muscles are after I get home from work. Modal dialogs are one of the worst ideas ever dreamed up for a user interface. Please tell me they're still strongly recommended against. If it turns out that they are now encouraged (or even tolerated) I will have to sit quietly and weep in mourning for a better world.

Small screens

Posted Mar 23, 2011 1:27 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]

As an aside, I really liked the early stuff I saw in gnome-shell. If they hadn't removed it from the Ubuntu repository for Natty I'd be looking at it right now to see if it was really as bad as it sounds. I looked at Unity for about 30 seconds, but it seems to be essentially a poor-man's gnome-shell.

So I'm not a hater - even though I can't test (easily) at my desktop right now I'd love to. But I deal with poor UI often enough at work; I don't want to come home to it as well, nor to work in an environment made solely of worse UI than I'm used to seeing in GNOME 2.

Small screens

Posted Mar 24, 2011 15:28 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Modal dialogs are part of what makes Microsoft Windows unusable as a desktop environment. I have to work with Windows almost every day at work, due to some specialized (and closed-source) applications we use in our field.

>I used to give Windows the benefit of the doubt, saying "well, I haven't used it since Windows 95. It can't still be that bad

While I don't disagree with the general gist of your point, it sounds like you are expecting newer versions of Windows to have somehow forced all applications not to have modal dialogs, which is surely impossible?

Small screens

Posted Mar 24, 2011 18:43 UTC (Thu) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]

No, of course not - but there is the matter of the HID guidelines. If Microsoft has also put out a document strongly recommending against modal dialogs and application developers just ignore it, well, at least they tried right? I've never heard such a thing, but then, I haven't looked for it either.

But I know that the number of modal dialogs I see per week on my Linux desktop can be numbered in the single digits, if at all. The number of times I've needed to find some data in a parent window before answering a question asked in a child window - and been unable to because I can't interact with the parent at all while the child is open... countless on Windows. Regardless of the cause, the effect as a whole is the same.