Thread: Help support Automatic Screen Rotation (Univeral Portrait support) for the N900
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kanishou is offline kanishou
2009-09-26 , 21:17
Posts: 341 | Thanked: 607 times | Joined on Dec 2008
#63
Originally Posted by christexaport View Post
What if the widgets had some mechanism to resize and or relocate upon rotation? This is the type of solution we're working to bring to fruition, not just a messy rotate and that's it.
That's a bit like requiring all applications to support portrait mode. A very intrusive and work-intensive solution. Not impossible, but lowering the chances of this happening soon.

I've come to notice that with the solutions many are now supporting in the Brainstorm, for anything to be feasible, there may be a need to limit widgets to 480x480, but that is still a pretty large widget, larger than an N95 screen, so it shouldn't be a problem for most widget designers.
Many community widgets I have seen appear to be larger than this already though. And once you start adding limitations for landscape mode, you are stepping outside the realm of "if you don't need it, it's not going to hurt you".

Could you check my solution (I think its solution #5 in this Brainstorm), and tell me if it sounds inelegant to you if done properly and successfully? I like my idea, and everyone else does so far. Not sure how possible it will be to implement it, but a good solution is at least possible if thought out properly.
I've seen it, and no I don't find it elegant I'm afraid. The message is very intrusive, and repositioning each widget twice can be a nuisance. You are not even guaranteed to have the same amount of space available on both orientations, as the title stripes take up different volumes of space. Moreover, if you keep the four homescreens also in portrait orientation, you need a solution to what to do with the backgrounds (stretching them will look horrible, rotated they won't fit together anymore). This has also been pointed out before.

I don't think the dashboard is so hard an issue. The tiles can show the apps in native orientation if they only support one,
The problem is, the tiles show a thumbnail of the application _without_ the titlebar, so they don't have the same aspect ratio in landscape and portrait mode. In landscape, the thumbnail is created from an 800x424 image, in portrait the thumbnail would be created from a 480x744 image. This is not going to look any good.

or be rotated for apps that support that. The position of the tiles would stay the same, just the data in them would need to change. Then there's the issue of titling the tiles, but just not showing a title in portrait could be a solution. You can always just look and see what it is.
Not sure I understand all of this correctly. But as for "be rotated for apps that support that", the question is also when to do that rotation, considering that it might take some time.

You may see no reason, but it helps us to get votes on the solutions in the brainstorms so we know which ideas are supported and which we should ignore. Community involvement in a positive manner is always needed, and the more the better.

So head on over and be heard!
http://maemo.org/community/brainstor..._in_fremantle/
As I work on Fremantle full time right now, I'm not exactly an unbiased community member. These are just my personal opinions though, of what I think would have a reasonable chance to become reality (either officially or as an open source effort). I don't have any say in that whatsoever, nor any particular inside-knowledge. Voting is not going to make any difference though, if a proposal still has fundamental design-flaws.
 

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