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I've been told the concept of scaling a UI is akin to the concept of "write once, run anywhere". That is, it works fine in theory. It just hasn't ever worked
by roc 14y ago
I've been told the concept of scaling a UI is akin to the concept of "write once, run anywhere".
That is, it works fine in theory. It just hasn't ever worked as advertised in reality. And trying has often generated more pain than it's saved.
It's worth noting that much of modern web design moved to a place of fixed minimum widths and white-space taking up the remainder. Responsive design promises to change that a bit toward scaling UI, but thus far is just a mechanism by which designers can incorporate a few hand-tuned minimum-width variants.
- Joeri 14y agoSencha touch does scalable UI across tablet and phone form factors. They even resize controls so they have the same physical dimensions on different dpi screens, and this is all in the browser. I'm sure when you go native the possibilities only increase.
- obviator 14y agoRight from the start Android has been designed with a form of Responsive Design. With scalable XML layouts, and selectors to choose which layout is loaded for different DPI devices, one could argue that even early versions of Android are at least as design-friendly as modern HTML5. That's not to say there aren't challenges. But the whole point of Android was always to create an industry standard for a wide range of devices. This requires - by definition - support for a variety of screen sizes, DPIs, hardware features, etc. When most people talk about fragmentation as a negative point of Android, they're forgetting what Android is. A common platform, running on an unlimited number of devices. That's by design, not accident.