Resizing stack window by scaling

Pyyhtiä Christer christer at mindcrea.com
Sat Oct 21 07:22:31 EDT 2017


The following is only one opinion of many possible.

First, you should consider automatic scaling only with a very restricted amount of cases.  These are for example sort of games, where the "playing field" is the better the larger it is, and the icons / images and their relative positions or moves act well.

Second, if you want to make a balanced user interface, you might use the full size of a phablet, but with larger tablets or laptops, you might choose the window to be smaller, and the width and height to be in relation to a phone / phablet form.  You maintain your smart phone at a distance of 30+ cm (1 ft), and a laptop or tablet twice the distance.  This gives you a guidance for required sizing of the display of your app on a smartphone / phablet / tablet & laptop.

The result is that you want to do the scaling retaining the relative positions of objects in all device implementations. I even think that you should drop the option for rotating the display along the device position changes portrait / landscape - unless it is a part of the features and functions of your app.

Further the result is that you need to maintain a log of your objects and the possible inheritance of sub-objects (icon -> button; text content -> text field etc.), and do scaling for each object & level based on the screen size & resolution.

Yes it hurts initially, but it allows scaling to any device seamlessly.  In the case of laptops you just need to define the max window size you want to use (vs the # of available pixels you need), and do some desk simulation what it means on different sizes of tablets.  A too big difference from a smart phone screen to a tablet may mean that you need to be able to dig out either from the device by your app coding (where LiveCode is very efficient), or just make assumptions, and have separate versions in distribution.

In addition a good tool is to make a test you can send to any user, mailing (with the permission of the user) you all the device characteristics, allowing you to embed yet another exception into your scaling code.  Yes, it hurts, but becomes easier every time you must take action.


Christer Pyyhtiä
christer at mindcrea.com





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