Re: Screen Resolution

["Joel Cochran" <joelcochran@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is a common problem in GUI development.  It really depends on the
application design.  Some designs scale well to larger sizes and some
don't.  Take an outlook style application: the application is essentially
two panes separated by a splitter.  The contents of the right hand panel
easily expand to accommodate wider resolutions without impacting the
usability of the application.  In this case, the width of the user's
resolution is largely inconsequential as the application will function just
as easily on 640 as it would on 1920.

Now pretend that the right hand panel has a fixed number of text boxes,
labels, and other controls.  These do not "flow" based on resizing.  Now the
problem becomes apparent: a smaller resolution will force the user to use
scroll bars to navigate to controls that are hidden due to the size.  Going
in the other direction, if you maximize the window you may end up with a lot
of  unused (and unsightly) space.

So obviously, one way to try to design it is with the issue of resizing in
mind.  I'm not suggesting it's easy, just that it's doable.

And another problem is that this is largely NOT a hardware problem: even
with the most modern equipment, the user can still set the resolution to
800x600.  I have this problem in our office: a couple of the data processors
think that everything else is too small.  I run my laptop at 1400 (only
because it won't go any smaller) and my boss complains that he can't read
it.  Some users are simply never going to feel comfortable moving to a
smaller resolution.

OK, so with all that said, let me point out that this is the entire point of
Microsoft's new WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and Silverlight (it's
browser based counter-part).  WPF is a vector-based GUI rather than a pixel
based one.  Issues such as screen resolution and scaling are no longer
factors because of the nature of Vectors, so you would never have to decide
which resolution to target.  I have not developed using WPF yet because I am
waiting for the IDE to support it, which it should in Visual Studio 2008
(which is now in Beta 2).  I have, however, seen demonstrations of
applications running with WPF and it is very impressive.  Unless you or your
shop are adamantly ABM (anything but Microsoft) you might consider
investigating this as a possibility.