Am Dienstag, 29. Mai 2007 11:51:13 schrieb Will Stephenson:

On Saturday 26 May 2007, Christian Lorch said:

...

I like unices and especially KDE for their efforts in beeing consistent in design (even the utilitys for burning, musik, scanning, ... :-) and therefore I dont want eg gwenview, digikam, amarok, k3b developing their own UI but...

Is there a possibility in (SuSE)-KDE-design to allow sort of "small screen interface" or to implement special design rules for some parts of the UI?

Depends on what you mean by small-screen - 1024x768? 640x480? Handheld?

small-screen-interface is misunderstandable, maybe small-size-ui is better? I have a 1400x1050/ 15" laptop-screen and normally I am fully pleased with the usual design of most applications, but when you open e.g. digikam (after having worked half a day with the adobe counterpart) it came into my mind that the usage of the space is not 100% perfect. You may look at the "Albenliste" (left side) or the "Stichwort-Filter" (tags, right side), it would be nicer to use (from my point of view) if the space between the lines would not be equal to the usual KDE-spaces but smaller, maybe the fontsize could be smaller, too. I dont want some apps to develop their own design guide but in some case is could be better to provide a different ui-style, maybe only in parts of the screen. And maybe it would be interesting to provide a KDE-wide setting/ rule for such parts of the ui. Did you get my point?

You can squeeze the UI quite a lot without changing code by using a lightweight style, smaller fonts, icons and window decorations. AFAIK the convention is to design dialogs that fit into 800x600 screens with the default style settings, but I'm not sure that this is policed. Below that you do have to start rearranging the UI to remove elements to make them fit. This is a lot of work and distracts from KDE's target market which is desktop/laptop computers. However some developers have produced derivative versions of KDE programs which do work on smaller displays - search for Konqueror/Embedded and KDEPIM/PI. The problem then is keeping two distinct codebases in sync.

I happily use KDE at 1024x768 on my Thinkpad X60 (12.1" screen) - I'll try and post a screenshot today on my opensuse.org page.

Will

Thanks a lot Christian -- Christian Lorch :: der nett.Zwerg-Berater just visit :: http://salocke.xto.de :: just married