[PATCH 2/2] Shrink the minimum size for preferences window

[Miika Turkia]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 2:06 PM, Thomas Pfeiffer
<thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org> wrote:
> On 25.07.2016 14:07, Miika Turkia wrote:
>>
>> Let's have the preferences window as small as possible with the current
>> data in it. This should allow people with vertical resolution of 600 to
>> use the preferences window.
>>
> Just a little input from a designer: Although I haven't seen the new layout
> in action, the statement that you want to make a window as small as possible
> in order for it to work with a vertical resolution of 600 sounds a bit
> dangerous to me.
> While making your application work for as wide a range of systems as
> possible is an honorable idea as such, you may risk deteriorating the
> experience of the vast majority of users just to cater to a tiny minority.
> In general, giving a dialog more "breathing room" makes for a better user
> experience most of the time. The more cramped a dialog is, the harder it is
> to make out its individual elements, and the less "friendly" it appears
> overall.
>
> Has Subsurface determined the screen size it wants to support somewhere? If
> not, you should, and you should make that a very conscious decision.
> 600 vertical pixels sounds like a quite low resolution to still support in a
> desktop application nowadays.
> If you look at for example the w3schools statistics [1], 600px or lower
> vertical resolution just makes up 3.3% of internet users. Assuming that the
> population of Subsurface users is similar to the sample of these statistics,
> you'd risk deteriorating the experience of 96.7% of users for the benefit of
> 3.3%.
>
> I don't mean to tell you what to do, just to provide a word of caution.

The space I shaved off seemed like dead space to me, so it should not
hinder user experience. However, different fonts or environment might
affect the layout...

Anyway, do you have ideas how to ensure usability in similar
situation? The defacto location for buttons at the bottom of the
screen is not ideal as that is the part that is typically out of the
screen if the window is too big. And frankly, bigger changes in the UI
are beyond my skills :D

miika