Same interface? [LWN.net]

Same interface?

Posted Aug 31, 2011 15:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Same interface? by sebas
Parent article: The year of the Linux tablet?

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.

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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.)