Netbook-friendliness

[Etan Reisner]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2011 at 06:29:52PM -0500, Chris DeJoseph wrote:
> The scroll bars would only appear if it detects elements of the window are
> outside of the window, so the preferences window wouldn't usually have
> them, seeing as quite frankly, there's allot of wasted vertical space with
> that window I find

Is there wasted space on *every* page or just on some? Because the window
needs to be tall enough to account for every page and scrollbars really
aren't a viable solution as they will make the dialog significantly more
unwieldy and ugly.

It might be possible to have the scrollbars only show up if the dialog is
larger than the screen but I'm not sure if there's a way to make that
automatic and if there isn't (which I expect) then that means playing
rather horrible games with attempting to determine final display size of
the window and changing the layout of the window on the fly or (and this
is likely simpler but also more ugly) detecting that the window, once
displayed, is taller than the screen and visibly resizing it.

Which page(s), in particular, are too large for your screen?
What, specific, suggestions do you have, if any, for ways we can cause
that page to be less vertically tall?

Spurred by your original there was a brief discussion in the pidgin XMPP
MUC room about this where I commented that (on my screen) the two long
pages are Conversations and Sounds.

The Sounds page should auto-scale since the large 'Sound Events' section
is already in a scrollable area I believe.

I suggested that, for the Conversations page, we could move the 'Show
detailed information' (and 'Enable buddy icon animation') checkboxes to
the Interface page and that that might help a little. I don't know how
much that'd help (or if it would actually help at all) but it was the best
I could come up with at a quick glance.

    -Etan

P.S. It should be noted, for the record, that some time ago we had a large
overhaul of the preferences dialog with a mind to keeping it vertically
reasonable. It would appear though that it has grown a bit since then.