Paradigm Change

[Bill R]

Like many, I've always looked for applications for my PDA that made sensible use of the very little real estate available but also worked well.

Since I got my Redfly though, I tend to find that old paradigm changing. No longer am I happy with apps that have different tabs or screens that have to be navigated too when using the Redfly.

My best example would be Pocket Outlook. I find it nearly perfect when using the PDA itself, but greatly frustrating when using my Redfly. I want the folder pane on the same screen as the actual emails, much like Outlook for the PC or Thunderbird.

The point I am trying to make is that I hope software authors start making their applications "resolution aware", i.e. when viewed on the standard PDA screen it would appear one way, but when viewed on a higher resolution screen would appear another way. It seems a waste of the screen to have big areas of white space. I find myself wanting to shrink the window some to make it display less white space make it look better.

I know it's more and bigger coding, but hey, with bigger Micro SD cards, that doesn't matter so much any more. Besides, it's just my opinion.

 

[Aware]

Bill,

there are more devices coming out with screen resolutions as high as 800x480. Many others with VGA (640x480) or half VGA (480x320). As they do, the software certainly becomes more real estate aware, but it always assumes a diagonal size that will not exceed around 3.5 or 4 inches. So even if the software recognises the larger resolution of the RedFly desktop, the developers always assume that the usable real estate is little different from the standard QVGA screen.

Text-based apps like Excel or Word typically just scale the screen, and in fact that's fine for our needs, but no apps that I am familiar with stretch out and fill the extra screen space with etra toolbars or functionality. Given that 99.9% of the target audience for the PDA software is NOT using a REDFLY, I don't epxect that to change for a while.

Maybe we should start approaching software developers with requests...

 

[Bill R]

Bill,
Maybe we should start approaching software developers with requests...

Someone needs to. The technology is changing and higher resolution devices are going to become the norm. It's almost to the point where it would be helpful to be able to switch between the Pocket PC interface to the WinCE interface as your resolution changes.

Imagine this; you drop your phone into a cradle connected to a dock that is connected to your mouse, keyboard, and widescreen display. You get the old WinCE interface. Pull it out of the dock, you get the more optimized Pocket PC interface on your phones display.

Best of both worlds I would think, but the apps need to be aware of the change and adjust accordingly.