Comments on: Small Is Beautiful

By: Langan

Langan — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:14:53 +0000

Posts like this are whatt keep me coming back for more. Thank you!

By: Emmet Hikory

Emmet Hikory — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 07:00:52 +0000

There are actually a couple factors in play here. It’s not just about picking something that works at a given resolution, but making things work for a variety of resolutions and DPI settings. Someone with 800×600 at 75 DPI (13.3″ screen) wants something different than someone with 1024×600 at 200 DPI (e.g. Sony UX). In the former case, small is “clean”, wheras in the latter case small is “unusable”. The trick is to get widgets & applications to set heuristics for display based on the combination of DPI and resolution to make something work nicely.

To put it another way, an interface that looks excellent at 800 x 480, 200 DPI (common MID-type device) tends to look lousy over VNC when pixel-mapped to a 17″ 1024×768 display.

By: Tony Yarusso

Tony Yarusso — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 03:07:59 +0000

Absolutely – things that push the limits like Evolution don’t even fit on my screen, and that’s 1024×768! Maddening.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:10:50 +0000

Yeah, I use an Eee PC so I know first-hand the difficulties of having to Alt+Drag almost everything. Compizconfig-settings is BRUTAL, to the point of being useless on the 800*480 resolution. I for one, wouldn't mind an alternate way, without all the prettiness perhaps, to change my compiz settings.

I think I will start a thread on the EeeUser.com forums asking people to submit information on programs that need to be dragged on the Eee. If we do compile a list of programs, what do you recommend we do with it?

By: Maxo

Maxo — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:50:27 +0000

Oh, I was also hoping that in the future, Jono would keep his fetish of small things out of his blog.

By: Maxo

Maxo — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:49:24 +0000

I was just going to post about how bad the installer is on this issue as well. Many of the settings, both administrative and specific to the user, are done through windows that don’t fit on a screen running at lower than 1024X768. One easy solution to me, it seams, would be for GTK to make the windows fit int he screen and then add scroll bars. This is how most programs who have large screens on small displays work in Windows.

By: mattj

mattj — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:55:53 +0000

I got mine on tuesday, It is an excellent piece of kit. I have two desktops that I was using every day, and an old dell laptop. I havn't used the old laptop or the powermac since. It has completly changed what I want in a laptop(or possibly Kneetop!) I would never have a full sizrd laptop again, I can just chuck the eee in my bag when I go to college, I don't need to think about taking a laptop bag, charger etc.

The screen resoution can be a bit annoying at times, but hopefully, this will get solved (Ubuntu mobile maybe?)

Did you just use the Xandros OS or install anything else. I couldn't stand it so I put some Ubuntu goodness on it. Its lovely.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:20:16 +0000

I have a similar issue with Firefox’s pref pane; it’s not too large for my x40′s screen, per se, but when operating mouse-less, I can’t resize it so that the controls don’t disappear at the bottom of the window. So actually the window is too small. Maybe I should switch window managers come to think of it (whilst I wait for a replacement thinkpad nipple)

By: Vincent

Vincent — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:03:56 +0000

The two commenters before me have already pointed this out, but I thought I’d yet emphasize it some more The installer doesn’t seem to work at 800×600. The bug is apparently already reported, with a “high” priority and 32 duplicates up til now. The shocking thing, however, is that this bug was reported on 2006-04-06, which is since (before?) Dapper and still hasn’t been fixed. In fact, I’m a bit surprised I hadn’t heard of it before that blog post I linked to.

By: Stu

Stu — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:03:30 +0000

Maybe a testing vmware image is needed, that defaults to lower resolutions