All operating systems have to be accessible and configurable, or some people won’t be able to access or use them, including those of us in third world countries, people without resources and disabled people, but this point is both off topic and missing the point.

I find it infuriating that I can’t even configure my FONT SIZE or DPI settings (and countless others) because the dialogue box doesn’t fit on my 1400×900 screen, and because there are no scroll bars to get to the ‘Apply’ or ‘OK’ buttons which are invariably off the bottom of the screen.

The author’s point is that if you make your dialogues fit on smaller screen resolutions, they will fit on all of the other ones too.

And what monkey is saying that ’scroll bars are ungainly’? They’re useful, aren’t they? This sounds dangerously like nerdy developer snobbery, which is actually making their applications unusable.

Form Follows Function, its really very obvious, and thanks too for the ALT+click workaround which solved a couple of irritating problems I’ve had for a couple of years on my Suse box.

thanks so much for the Alt-Drag trick.

This is saving my life on my 800×480 resolution

…dont ask

Thank God the scrollbars are back!

“Removing” the accessibility part out of “make 800×600 usable” is not “forget the accessibility” My sight is going rather bad too with time. However it is not a reason for me to ask people to make the Hollywood sign bigger and more visible.

My problem was with your lumping together 3 separate problems: HIG, Accessibility, Economic/Functional limitation on screensize.

HIG argument can stand quite well on its own. Judging by the http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2326 series, there is a will to simplify.

Accessibility front: you have to augment the reality with bigger screen if you have a sight problem. We have crutches, wheelchairs and often social ways to subsidize them. Cramming a modern OS into 800×600 will not solve the problem.

Economic / Functional limits are rather outside of realm of our preparing for it. Bigger / better / color screen is a question of economic priorities in life.

> To accommodate people with impaired sight, the size
> of fonts can be made infinitely large, which makes
> the “dialog size problem” infinitely unsolvable,

I don’t see how this has any practical relevance. No one can or will run with “infinitely large” fonts so it’s a straw man’s argument. However, some will run with fonts /a bit/ larger than normal, and that’s managable. I don’t consider the “infinitely large fonts” scenario you claim exist, so this problem is not “infinitely unsolvable”.

I don’t see how this problem become less drastic by removing any accessibility requirements(not that one would be able to pull through such a decision), one still has issues such as people running old monitors, new hardware, people wanting to use managable windows, etc.

The best thing would obviously be that the dialogs were properly designed such that no problem existed at all, but as long as developers doesn’t fix their dialogs the problem remains. For that reason I believe scroll bars are good, because they make dialogs at least usable. Don’t get me wrong: if someone can come up with an approach to fix all dialogs and ensure they remains so, please go ahead.

I don’t think scroll bars hide the problem, but the contrary. They get activated even on displays that can fit a broken dialog, and this means developers have a difficulty ignoring this issue(since the cumbersome scroll bars appear).

Frans

There are quite a few variables to the size of dialogs. Same KMail Configure window fits fine on my 1024×768. Your DPI is almost the same, (104×104).

The issue is probably “overblown fonts” and widget style, of which “overblown fonts” is your egregious offender. To accommodate people with impaired sight, the size of fonts can be made infinitely large, which makes the “dialog size problem” infinitely unsolvable, given the constraints of “we have to do it at 800×600″ Putting 1-4 options per config page becomes rather absurd and approaches Mac’ish / Gnome’ian proportions.

Windows XP at 800×600 is no pickick either with large fonts, but it doesn’t mean it’s Windows XP’s fault.
If you need to use huge fonts, you need to have special accommodation in a form of bigger screen.

You take the accessibility out of the equation and the situation becomes solvable, because then the problem no longer seems so drastic.

the reason it was reverted was that it was put into svn shortly before a release and was amazingly buggy. as one example, it was trivial to trigger infinite resize loops where the dialog content would stutter back and forth between two layout sizes rendering the entire dialog useless. in fact, some of the dialogs in their default sizes that did fit on 800×600 triggered this bug.

in future i’d suggest committing code earlier in the release cycle with proper peer review. since that release i don’t seem to have seen any effort to fix the problems with the scrollbars either.

the question of “are scrollbars a good idea within dialogs?” is a good one. it allows people with smaller resolution screens to get at dialog contents that are too large easier. unfortunately it also looks horribly amateurish while masking the real problem.

some proper usability work on the area might be nice as well.

1024×768 42.75%
1280×1024 26.47%
800×600 7.86%
1152×864 4.43%
1280×800 3.77%
1600×1200 3.54%
1400×1050 2.10%
1440×900 1.55%
1280×960 1.44%
1920×1200 1.22%

As you can see 800×600 is the world’s 3rd most popular resolution – if you assume that my site is representative of the world