2011/11/18 Christian Giordano
<christian.giordano@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 11:55 PM, Matthew Paul Thomas
<mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Why? Why are they designed for a specific size, when that's
> against the Gnome HIG?
That isn't true either. The HIG says that toolboxes should be
resizable, that alerts shouldn't be, and that progress windows should
be in specific cases. It says nothing about the resizability of
settings or Preferences windows. And since the Gnome developers
believe that System Settings shouldn't contain third-party panels (a
misguided belief, but that's another story), the HIG doesn't contain
guidelines for designing panels at all.
Indeed: "In order to fit on Netbooks screens all panels should be 675x530px.", and then, "NB. The shell panel is 26px tall, window decorations on Awaita are 32px tall and the systems settings toolbar is 50px tall. That means a panel needs to be roughly below 490px in height to fit on a netbook screen."
Any usability experts wishing to comment on that? To my non-expert mind, not only do the guidelines contradict themselves (fixed size 675x530 in order to fit on netbooks, but netbooks have only 490px available), but they also add invalid constraints to large monitors (invalid because a 1920x1080 monitor does not have the same constraints as a 1024x600 one). Isn't this the very issue that resizable windows are supposed to solve?
Not to mention that 675x530px takes up more than 1/2 of a 1024x600 monitor, which means you cannot refer to documentation at the same time as system-settings.