Hi
As promised I have collected my latest thoughts on how to handle the screen
density conundrum.
I think for the way the majority of people work in LiveCode then a single stack
needs to be able to scale to as many sizes and resolutions as possible. There
are going to be cases where that's not logical like a completely different
tablet ui compared to mobile one etc but for the most part the ui just needs to
adapt to the working screenRect.
I was deliberately ignoring screen density in the above. When we bring screen
density into the equation we want some interface elements to scale relative to
density. Other elements might need to scale relative to the stack dimensions or
other things on the card.
Let's for a minute assume we know android screen density. I've asked on the dev
list if RunRev will comment on providing that as it would appear to be a minor
add for them.
So we know the density we are running at and now we have the choice of the
following:
- scale things to the screen density in preOpenCard
- pro - little app bloat from dealing with screen density
- con - places high load on the device the first time a card is opened
- create multiple substacks and present the correct one
- pro - only needs a very simple framework if any, little load on
device, higher performance
- con - maintenance duplication, loading lots into memory
- same as above but using stackfiles
- pro - lower memory use
- con - not as convenient in ide
- creating multiple stackfiles at build time
- pro - little load on device, little load on developer, cloning stacks
would duplicate scripts too.
- con - app bloat
It looks like there's no easy answer. If app bloat is of little concern then
perhaps the last option would be best but for android we would be limited to
density categories rather than the actual density. If the load on device can be
mitigated using things like scaling images as Good like Chipp does then perhaps
that's the best option.
Cheers
--
M E R Goulding
Software development services
Bespoke application development for vertical markets
mergExt - There's an external for that!
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