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

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

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.

• 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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