unity-design team mailing list archive

["Stefanos A." <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx>]

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.
>
>
> In the System Settings design guidelines, Gnome basically refers to these
> panel as fix in size and states how big they should be in pixels:
> https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings
>
>
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.