[arch-releng] dialog sizes in archlinux-installer / aif
Hi all, A purely cosmetical issue, but something that I want to address: the sizes of dialog boxes in aif current approach in aif: some hardcoded values in the revelant functions of lib-ui. problem: for some dialogs they look good, for others they are waay to big (if you've played with aif you may have noticed this already), and hardcoding values is bad practice anyway. Dialog seems to have an "auto sizing" (just fill in 0 as height/width/.. parameter) feature which seems to work quite well: it makes sure what you want to display fits in the dialog and there is some extra padding space so it looks good, so I think I should use this. However, the old installer ( http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=installer.git;a=blob_plain;f=setup;hb=HEAD ) seems to make use of the autosizing often, but also often it still uses hardcoded values. Is there any specific reason for this? Can things go "wrong" by just relying on auto-sizing everywhere? Also, dialog provides an --aspect parameter to control the aspect when using autosizing, however I don't see the need for this. without it, dialog always makes sure the content fits nicely. Even more, I noticed that even when you use extreme aspects (--aspect 1 or --aspect 500), it still shows your content nicely (even if it's for example one long line), looks to me like it doesn't even do much? Dieter
On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@plaetinck.be> wrote:
Hi all, A purely cosmetical issue, but something that I want to address: the sizes of dialog boxes in aif
current approach in aif: some hardcoded values in the revelant functions of lib-ui. problem: for some dialogs they look good, for others they are waay to big (if you've played with aif you may have noticed this already), and hardcoding values is bad practice anyway.
Dialog seems to have an "auto sizing" (just fill in 0 as height/width/.. parameter) feature which seems to work quite well: it makes sure what you want to display fits in the dialog and there is some extra padding space so it looks good, so I think I should use this.
However, the old installer ( http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=installer.git;a=blob_plain;f=setup;hb=HEAD ) seems to make use of the autosizing often, but also often it still uses hardcoded values. Is there any specific reason for this? Can things go "wrong" by just relying on auto-sizing everywhere?
Also, dialog provides an --aspect parameter to control the aspect when using autosizing, however I don't see the need for this. without it, dialog always makes sure the content fits nicely. Even more, I noticed that even when you use extreme aspects (--aspect 1 or --aspect 500), it still shows your content nicely (even if it's for example one long line), looks to me like it doesn't even do much?
Could you perhaps generate some screenshots of these things, so we can see? I think it would be better to remove the hardcoded sizes, but I just want to see how things look too.
On Fri, 6 Mar 2009 15:44:20 -0600 Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@plaetinck.be> wrote:
Hi all, A purely cosmetical issue, but something that I want to address: the sizes of dialog boxes in aif
current approach in aif: some hardcoded values in the revelant functions of lib-ui. problem: for some dialogs they look good, for others they are waay to big (if you've played with aif you may have noticed this already), and hardcoding values is bad practice anyway.
Dialog seems to have an "auto sizing" (just fill in 0 as height/width/.. parameter) feature which seems to work quite well: it makes sure what you want to display fits in the dialog and there is some extra padding space so it looks good, so I think I should use this.
However, the old installer ( http://projects.archlinux.org/?p=installer.git;a=blob_plain;f=setup;hb=HEAD ) seems to make use of the autosizing often, but also often it still uses hardcoded values. Is there any specific reason for this? Can things go "wrong" by just relying on auto-sizing everywhere?
Also, dialog provides an --aspect parameter to control the aspect when using autosizing, however I don't see the need for this. without it, dialog always makes sure the content fits nicely. Even more, I noticed that even when you use extreme aspects (--aspect 1 or --aspect 500), it still shows your content nicely (even if it's for example one long line), looks to me like it doesn't even do much?
Could you perhaps generate some screenshots of these things, so we can see? I think it would be better to remove the hardcoded sizes, but I just want to see how things look too.
Scratch my "--aspect doesn't do much", i was using an alias that already added an --aspect. Anyway, I just switched all sizes to use the autosize feature in aif. just the --aspect is hardcoded to 15 (i took this over from the previous installer). I did some testing and it looks good. I also made a bunch of screenshots. see before-* and after-* shots at: http://users.edpnet.be/dieter/aif/ maybe we'll need to finetune a bit in some places where newlines should be put to improve readability (see for example after-welcome.png or after-partitioneditorfull.png ), but other then that it seems all will be good. Dieter
participants (2)
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Aaron Griffin
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Dieter Plaetinck