Same interface? [LWN.net]

Same interface?

Posted Aug 24, 2011 17:20 UTC (Wed) by Chocrates (subscriber, #67068)
In reply to: Same interface? by corbet
Parent article: The year of the Linux tablet?

I still think its a valid comment. I use my phone for a certain set of tasks. I use my PC for others. And if i had a tablet id use it for another set. While some of these overlap, a web browser for one, I would greatly prefer an optimized interface for the hardware, with simply some way to share data between. Preferably with compatible document types if its applicable. I don't need my tablet to look like a big phone.

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Same interface?

Posted Aug 25, 2011 8:41 UTC (Thu) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (3 responses)

Exactly. :-)

You want your devices to work consistently, but take advantage of the special hardware you're using. For that reason, I think one interface for tablets and laptops (as an example) is suboptimal, because you end up compromising on both sides. Some of the complaints about gnome-shell and Unity are I think symptomatic for these compromises.

In Plasma Active, we're sharing components and infrastructure across devices, but create specialized interfaces suitable for the type of device (screen, input methods, etc.), and the use-cases that go along with it to get the best user experience out of your hardware. The end result will (hopefully :-)) be a system that works consistently across devices, integrates well with your other form-factors and is easily adaptable to new types of devices.

And yes, the plan is to also support smartphones at some point, but given the "closedness" of this segment of the device spectrum, we are concentrating on tablets first -- a lot of that work also benefits an eventual phone interface at some point in the future, and not to forget the desktop and netbook interfaces.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 15:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes yes indeed. It's sensible to have a menu locked to the top of the screen on a handheld, just as it's sensible to have gestural interfaces on a handheld. The first is broken by a big screen, the second by machines where the screen is not held in your hand. Thus, different interfaces are absolutely required.

It's a shame the GNOME people didn't notice this. You can't just give the two things the same UI without frustrating a lot of people.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 17:58 UTC (Wed) by tshow (subscriber, #6411) [Link] (1 responses)

Top of the screen menu is also particularly lousy with multihead setups.

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 22:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite so. Top of which screen? Sod's Law says, whichever screen you weren't using. (Not that other programs are exactly blameless in this area: you'd go green if you saw the appalling hack I'm using to make libsdl-1.2 work on my dual-monitor setup.)