Kontact Touch on larger screens, flaps wider hack

[Bernhard Reiter]

Am Donnerstag, 5. Mai 2011 13:33:35 schrieb Sebastian Kügler:
> On Thursday, May 05, 2011 09:43:06 Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> >   Me and my ideapad with Kontact Touch were alone on a train...
> > Because of QML I could do a quick hack to address a major usability
> > problem: It is too hard to hit the flaps on the left.
> >
> > The changes outlined at the bottom will make the flaps slightly wider and
> > the  interface uglier, but for me this is a large usability gain. This
> > works a lot better on the n900 or HTC Touch Pro2 because someone can
> > slide in from the left side. For whatever reasons this does not work on
> > the ideapad. I don't know about the exopc slate or the weetab, but I
> > guess a slightly larger flap can also help there.
>
> I haven't tested the changes, but widening the flaps seems
> counter-intuitive to me. I'm running Kontact Touch on a Wepad, and the
> biggest UI problems are:
>
> - flaps too wide, hard to reach the second column

How interesting! 
Maybe we use it differently:
Because the idepad is a netbook that can be changed to a tablet, the frame 
around the display is realtively thick, the frame is not on the same depth 
level as the screen. So I cannot slide in unto the touchscreen in from the 
left and I am using my finger.

I take you can slide in from the side and you are using your left thumb?
Then you cannot reach the second column with the thumb, because you would have 
to reach over the flap?

Maybe you can try to set 
  property int collapsedWidth : 16
or so in /usr/lib/kde4/imports/org/kde/SlideoutPanel.qml
and restart Kontact Touch Mail.

> - items too high, screen space wasted

For the ideapad the height of entries in the folder and email list seems to be 
okay, they can be easily hit with a finger.

> Now I know those come mainly from the vastly different DPI values on the
> N900 and the Wetab, so we'd need some kind of flexible mechanism here,
> rather than hardcoding values.

Yes, this is why I mentioned doing it right in my "next steps". I just wanted 
to see if I could make a quick improvement and I could. :)
However what happens often in similiar cases is that a lot of time is poured 
into making the mechanics of the dynamics work. To know how it should work, 
we would need to have done a few interfaces manually though.  

> Puzzles me though that you experience the exact difference than I do, while
> the IdeaPad and the WeTab are pretty similar in resolution and DPI. Maybe
> I'm misunderstanding something?

Maybe? 8)


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