Get rid of the scroll bar on the right. Since real estate is so tight on PDAs, it might be wiser to have the two scroll bars next to each other on the same horizontal line.

Eg:

[<]===[>] [^]===[^]

The second [^] would be the down arrow.

Another further improvement would be to create custom scroll bars that are about 1/2 or 2/3 the width of the default ones, in order to squeeze out more screen space.

Just my 2c.

-Niek

Excellent idea!

So one would loose a bit of height but get more width?

Oh, and your idea of making the scrollbars thinner is definitely great! I'll see if that is possible.

Thanks for the comments!

Bye, Simon

• Re: GUI suggestion by Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @10:16

  As a user of Psion palmtops for some years, I see some things that can be improved. Symbian (Psion/EPOC developers) has published an excellent style guide: EIKON Application Style Guide. This document sums up many years of experience in GUI design on small devices. I'd say the vertical scrollbar is the most important to keep, as it would be hard to quickly jump up and down without it. A more important change is to move the arrow buttons to one end (or both ends) of the scrollbar (like in some KDE themes). This makes it much easier to operate with the pen (most devices will probably have a touch screen). There can be a similar button pair for horizontal scrolling, but without the scroll bar. Some things are unnecessary to keep on the screen. The menu should be hidden, accessible by a button (has worked nicely for ten years on Psion PDAs). Toolbars should be simple (like on the screenshots you've shown). All buttons should also be large enough to operate with a finger. Regards,  Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes

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• Re: GUI suggestion by reihal on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @12:55

  Get rid of the scrollbars completely, use the hand cursor instead, as have been used on Macs for ages. The Windows image-viewer ACDsee uses the hand cursor exclusively and have no scrollbars at all! This should be an option in KDE as well.

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• Re: GUI suggestion by Simon on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @13:03

  Ah, excellent idea. Hand cursor == small gameboy like joypad thingy, right? Hmm, I wonder if Qt supports it? :-} Hmmm, I'll probably just make it an option in the menus to turn off the scrollbars (combined with the idea someone else here brought up: make the menubar a toggable item, not visible all the time) Bye, Simon

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• Re: GUI suggestion by reihal on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @13:37

  This probably needs a hack of Qt. Another idea is to make scroll- status- and tool-bars auto-hide, like the taskbar in Windows and the Panel and taskbar in KDE. They pop-up when you place the cursor at the edge of the screen. The hand-cursor is used in all versions of Acrobat Reader as well, maybe it was old Aldus that started it. This could be applied to all apps, both regular KDE and embedded, you just shove the contents of a window or frame around while holding down a mouse-buttton.

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• Re: GUI suggestion by Ross Campbell on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @17:43

  the "hand-cursor" would make it impossible to drag-select text for cut& paste. Thumbs down!

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• Re: GUI suggestion by reihal on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @23:57

  It would be selectable, don't worry.

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• Re: GUI suggestion by pos on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @14:07

  The hand cursor is not really like a gameboy pad if I understand correctly. The hand cursor is what you get when you hold the spacebar down on adobe products like illustrator, acrobat and photoshop. The idea would be that once you touch the screen you take mouse coordinates and pan the page you are viewing based on how you move the mouse. The part of the page you click on stays under the pen tip. I believe AvantGo's web browser for the palm works this way. -pos

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• Re: GUI suggestion by Panayotis Vryonis on Monday 11/Dec/2000, @06:30

  Yes, AvantGO works this way, and it is quite functional. However, it is difficult to scroll down many pages at once ("I want to get to the bottom of this damn thing!"). Having the option of hidding the scroll bars is quite useful, especially if combined with some sort of "scrolling device", like the "Up-Down" buttons on Palms (is there support for such thing in Qt-embedded?). Joystick-like devices are very good when you *need* diagonal movement (ex. games). On a PDA I'd rather have 2 rolling-devices (I don't know how you call it in english, you know like the old style buttons used in radios to manage the volume). One at the top of the device (I could use it with my thumb) to scroll horizontally and one at the left side (where the pointer usually is) to scroll vertically... Panayotis. myPDA.jpg 4KB (4384 bytes)

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• Re: GUI suggestion by William C. Barwell on Saturday 21/Jan/2006, @00:13

  What KDE needs is a more general configurability of things like scroll bars. For example, they get a bit thin on a 21" monitor or larger. Fishing for the small target area with a mouse can be a pain. Seeing it well can be a pain. Which a lot of people will experience as the grow older, as I am finding out. And for some who have motor-coordination problems, being able to double a scroll bar's size would be useful. Being able to set colors would be good too, for those with vision problems. Generally speaking all around configurablity should be an aim in future KDE systems. As technology goes on we will have Linux on stuff from phones to PDA to 10" sub-portables to 32" screens and 42" home media centers, capable of monitor Display. One might envision future KDE systems with a set of preset configuations from PDA to large monitors, to widescreen laptops etc. Pick one which gets you in the ball park and then configure anything not quite right. A large screen might be set with wider scroll bars. It would be nice to have it sort of like Opera where you left click an item and pull up a configuration dialogue. Hit a scroll bar and set it 2 x normal size and make it light blue. And it would be nice to have profiles for more than one user on a machine. A big plus in a business setting. Or a one computer family situation. It would make it easer for somebody with several machines to coordinate uniform setups across machines.

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• Re: GUI suggestion by cph on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @12:17

  I would go even further and say that the title in the titlebar is not really necessary, and could be replaced by what is now the status bar/current status bar. Or at least on mouse-overs ?

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• Re: GUI suggestion by Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @12:44

  Oh, there is a titlebar? Totally unnecessary as a window shouldn't be resizable at all. The current application is always maximized on a PDA (except for dialog boxes). And mouse-over effects are not possible on a PDA, as you most often don't have a mouse but a touchscreen. Regards,  Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes

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• Re: GUI suggestion by Simon on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @12:58

  The titlebar I can't remove that easy, because it's what the Qt windowing system provides (well, I probably could remove it, but I'll better leave that to Qt ;-) You are definitely right on the statusbar issue. I will probably remove it then and implement "pen-overs" as tooltips (so that when you hover over a link the url gets displayed as tooltip, not in the statusbar. Bye, Simon

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• Re: GUI suggestion by Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes on Thursday 07/Dec/2000, @14:59

  "Pen-overs" are impossible - the touchscreen doesn't know where the pen is until you tap it. What you describe is implemented as follows in Psion Web: Tap once, link is displayed in a corner of the screen. Tap again, link is followed. These corner messages are Psion's variant of status bars - another great way of saving screen space. Regards,  Gaute Hvoslef Kvalnes

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