Target Stack-Screen Rect for Cross Platform Apps

[Sivakatirswami]

  I want to develop some edu things that will first and foremost end up 
running on a PC (win or mac mostly) and getting displayed on a projector 
in front of children.


But we plan to build out these apps, so that they have considerable 
resources for a studious individual to dig into them on their own 
time... so that they could run in the future web plug in and also in an 
iPad. Even future tablets.

The hot new tablet in India is only 800 X 600, which was a bit 
disappointing, but clearly they wanted to deliver something you could 
easily hold..

So I would be interested in any of your thoughts. I will probably lock 
it down to landscape since the design will be used on projectors...

If we build for XGA then it will take the entire vertical space (768) 
but I'm thinking that's not a good idea as I'm learning there are still 
a lot of hot notebooks that are XGA screen rect and they will want to 
see their task bar...Also if you do it in a web browser plug in 
sometimes the browser is hogging as much as 100 pixel for the URL field 
and all the widgets running in IE -- I screen shared on Skype with a new 
PC users recently and it seemed like they almost had 150px of "stuff" at 
the top of their browser and they did not a) use any of those widgets 
and b) did not know how to turn off their appearance. So the stack 
diagrams I had made on Lucid Chart for them to look at were partly below 
their screen...(forcein them to scroll up and down) until I suggested 
they turn off all that stuff at the top of the browser window.

The most conservative way to go would be to build at 800 X 600...it 
would still look pretty good on an iPad (but might not get accepted into 
the store because of the size?) but I'm itching to use more space...

Any thoughts?