im.pidgin.pidgin: dd6cba65ba8ebf4bfc960ab89cd787ebf378881b

[Sean Egan]

On Dec 4, 2007 3:25 PM, Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com> wrote:
> Maximizing the backlog when my window is already 385px is a bit over
> zealous.  It does absolutely nothing for me except make my UI, make it
> harder for me to read,

How does it make your UI harder to read?

> and emits a ton of signals for widget
> resizing/exposing.

I imagine this is a performance argument? I suspect that an additional
size-allocate keystroke every 80 or so keystrokes is negligable. Do
you have reason to suspect otherwise?

> If need be I can screen shot and measure in the gimp, but I really don't
> think I need roughly 60% of my window as backlog.

So you need 50% of your window as backlog and 10% of it as mostly
unused whitespace?

You do bring up a good point that the paper I referenced mentioned.
They mention that studies have concluded that the more backlog
available the better, but also that nobody actually ever looks at it.
What they conclude is that since context is hugely important, and
people never bother scrolling up, that most of the users being studied
*do* benefit from maximizing the back scroll. While we're not 'average
users,' nor do we go out of our way to design for them, I do see the
logic there, and admit that they match my usage pretty well.

-s.