[REBOL] Re: percent! - new datatype request
From: greggirwin:mindspring at: 21-Jun-2002 12:44
<< Yow! Any programmer who would make such an assumption (or assume that
everybody is running a particular browser, or has millions of colors, or
a 1.2 GHz processor, or ...) needs some professional experience...>>
True, but I'd bet money there are a *lot* of developers out there, even good
ones, that design and test on a single machine. I know I've seen a fair
amount of software that had quite obviously never been tested on more than a
single configuration.
View has a great 24 bit compositing engine built in, but I can tell you that
gradients can look pretty darn ugly at low color depths.
The common "out" is to define "minimum system requirements". My experience
is that product managers (excluding, perhaps, large horizontal market apps)
will gladly put that kind of disclaimer out there to save time and effort.
<< YMMV; but my experience is that when I'm designing a palm-top-sized
display, I'll want to lay out a screen in a totally different way that
I would for a desktop-/laptop-sized screen. >>
That assumes you know where your app is running. :) Historically, this would
be true because you would have to port your app to those platforms. So, I
guess another question is: Should we continue down the path of
platform-specific designs or try to create cross platform UIs? Lots of gray
areas in there as I see it. I think it will depend on the app and the
platforms it runs on.
<< That assumes that making the window larger keeps the font sizes the same.
It seems to me that sometimes that would be the desired effect, but that
sometimes one would like the fonts to scale up with the window. Just an
observation that we have one more moving part here. >>
Resizing and scaling are two completely distinct features/behaviors. Scaling
implies that *everything* scales uniformly. Mixing the two behaviors is a
design error IMO.
--Gregg
