ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alan Griffiths <alan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/01/16 21:50, Peter Bittner wrote:
> tl;dr -- The operating system (window manager?) shall decide how the
> apps are expected to present themselves. Apps should not try to do
> that, they shall wait for being notified about that their appearance
> changed.

Some of the posts to this thread appear to conflate the device
capabilities with the presentation style.

As noted, keyboards, displays, pointing devices, accelerometers can, in
the general case, be added and removed dynamically.

Presentation style is independent of these - fullscreen vs windowed,
small vs big icons|pointers|text, MDI vs SDI.

While the shell/window manager may take the available devices into
account when choosing the presentation style other things (user
options?) are also significant. And although we talk about "desktop" vs
"phone" modes that is really simplistic shorthand as there are other
scenarios (TV, kiosk) that may have overlapping presentation choices.

Apps have a legitimate interest in knowing the presentation style and
the devices available to them, but they cannot reliably deduce the
latter from the former.

-- 
Alan Griffiths  +44 (0)798 9938 758
Octopull Ltd    http://www.octopull.co.uk/