(non)pixel based margins in kmail-mobile

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 17:54:59 Marco Martin wrote:
> btw, so the suggested way remains mSize?

for now i think it’s the least worst thing we have.

in future we ought to do something smarter ...

both units and font tie the value to something on screen: either screen 
resolution (which iirc units still doesn’t hook into; details)  or font size.

screen resolution starts to encourage people to design to the screen. that is 
just horribly bad as an idea; i’ve been watching what people create as a 
result and instead of UIs that change as the screen size does they just scale. 
this is what i think of Androiditis (though even that platform is getting 
better at this)

font size is slightly better as it doesn’t encourage overly broad use. it does 
rely on sane font sizes, however. 32 px font will get a funny set of results.

the thing about margins is that they aren’t really scaled to any other part of 
the UI. they simply either look good or they don’t and it is highly dependent 
on the form factor being used. ime, a TV screen tends to benefits from bigger 
margins while a phone can get away with slimmer ones even at the same DPI and 
resolution.

really, what we need are presets for these things that scale appropriately 
behind the scenes. it is exactly like the old school margins and spacing 
defaults in KDialog from waaaaaay back.

just as with typography presets, we need margin presets.

or at least, that’s mho.

if we want to make units useful, we could extend it with such margin hints.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/active/attachments/20130814/e4caa578/attachment.sig>