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List:       kde-artists
Subject:    Re: [kde-artists] Oxygen accessibility and Tango compliance
From:       Torsten Rahn <torsten.rahn () credativ ! de>
Date:       2007-01-06 11:59:46
Message-ID: 200701061259.46967.torsten.rahn () credativ ! de
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Am Freitag, 5. Januar 2007 23:41 schrieb Matthew Woehlke:
> Jesse Schalken wrote:
> >> I feel that for these high resolutions the classical usability visual
> First: All my computers run at 1600x1200 resolution (technically, this
> one runs at 3200x1200; two screens at 1600x1200). I've been running that

Sorry, but what you're telling me is very likely not at all related to what I 
was talking about, because:

1) You are effectively talking about screen size. But that wasn't my concern 
at all. 
While 1600x1200 might sound like a high resolution, at 20' it's just a large 
screen size.
While the term "resolution" often refers to the screen geometry (i.e. the 
number of pixels available in x and y-direction, that's quite a misleading 
term. The correct use for it would actually be the number of dots per inch 
(dpi). That number is often between 72-96 dpi. 

When I'm talking about high resolution I mean values of about >=145 dpi. At 
that resolution you simply don't want 32x32 icons because that's less than 5 
mm for a medium sized icon and less than 2.5 mm for a small icon! At that 
size icons are so small that they are hard to recognize already and 
especially for people who don't use their computer 24/7 it's a real pain to 
manage to do a mouse click on them. On the other hand an icon which measures 
1 cm on a 72 dpi screen looks a lot more blurry than an icon which measures 1 
cm on a 144 dpi screen. The latter looks sharper and is easier to recognize.

2) What you are referring to is the setup of a developer. I know that some 
people who are developing software and websites develop at high screen size 
often combined with the use of multiple monitors at once.
The reason is that during the code development they have multiple konsoles or 
browsers opened in parallel (not "stacked" upon each other, i.e. without 
using tabs) to compare output and to make sure that they can quickly browse 
between them. Recently another good reason for such setups is the usage of 
virtual machines (like VMWare, QEMU, etc.) where you want to see a "full 
sized" window that doesn't cover the whole screen.

Sorry to tell you, but those setups are hardly representative for our target 
group and certainly weren't what my concern was about.

My concern was about high resolutions (i.e. >= 145 dpi) used by people who 
occasionally are using computers. Those people are certainly not screen space 
paranoid and usually prefer real life sized beautiful objects that are easy 
to click.

Torsten

> way for at least five years now. So I will consider myself an authority
> on my personal preferences at high resolution.
>
> That said, I don't care for icons larger than 32x32, and for toolbars, I
> would say that 32x32 is seriously pushing the limits of 'too big'. (I
> just glanced over at KDevelop (22x22 toolbar icons), in comparison to
> Thunderbird (32x32 toolbar icons), and I must say I find the utility of
> the smaller size to be much better. Most importantly, it allows more
> things to be displayed, and for power users, that can be a huge plus.
> The reason I run high-rez is because it allows /more/ on the screen at
> once. Size creep would completely defeat that purpose.
>
> I've heard something about 128x128 icons in Vista, and my thought is
> 'where on EARTH can they afford to waste that much screen space?!'. I
> remain convinced that the proper size for a menu icon is roughly equal
> to the height of the menu icon, which, let me be honest, is somewhere
> around 3 mm. Similarly, I would consider anything over about 1 cm to be
> too large for a generic icon (/maybe/ for a desktop icon, but I tend to
> have cluttered desktops ;-), plus I think smaller looks more 'tidy').
>
> So... that's my $0.02, which I can't quite tell if it is agreeing with
> Jesse or not. :-)
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