ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Lorn Potter <lorn.potter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/01/16 04:56, Stephen M. Webb wrote:
> On 16-01-11 01:26 PM, Lorn Potter wrote:
> > imho, we need some way that contained apps know if the device is desktop or phablet mode, which I assumed the QInputInfo
> > API was helping to detect. Right now, phablet mode becomes desktop mode when adding a bluetooth keyboard. Where as it
> > probably should be keyboard + external display on small display, because windowed mode on small screen is horrible to use.
>
> We need contained apps to be written in such a way that they don't need to know if they are on a phone, tablet, a
> laptop, or a desktop.  They should only need to know that they have a certain size of display surface to render to.
>
> Yes, there are exceptions for things that need certain hardware.  A step counter needs an accelerometer, for example.
> Just the like one I have in my Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro laptop.  Detecting available codecs in a gstreamer pipeline might also
> qualify.  None of these are phone/desktop checks, they're checks for available system functionality.  *Thats* where
> solutions need to live, not in an unreliable and poorly-defined proxy like "form factor."

Form factor is the basis for how we use and interact with these things.
This review even points out use cases for desktop/phablet mode, detected 
in part with the accelerometer (yay!):
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/5/5377754/lenovo-yoga-2-pro-review

> There is just no such thing as a phone or a desktop as separate entities.

Maybe not below the UI, but the UI sure needs to be different. In this 
respect they are different, in the least to the user.

I can turn my phone into a desktop at any
> time, and I have laptops I can turn into a tablet at any time.  There is only one Ubuntu Personal.

I think you just argued for having phablet/desktop mode and a need to 
detect it, otherwise your phone would already just be a desktop and 
would not need to 'be turned into' one. It's a dynamic thing. and it's 
because there is only one Ubuntu Personal that we need mode detection to 
allow developers to optimize their apps for the different use cases of 
different form factors.