Windows Phone 7 Has a Sense of Humour
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 22nd Oct 2010 18:18 UTC
Windows There's been a bunch of Windows Phone 7 reviews out there, and most of them come to the same conclusion: great piece of software for a 1.0 release, but it does miss a few vital features. The Ars Technica review, as usual very in-depth, highlights one particular aspect of the platform that speaks to me: Windows Phone 7 has a sense of humour.
E-mail Print r 4   · Read More · 52 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/igs
Thread beginning with comment 446817
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
RE[6]: .
by Icaria on Sun 24th Oct 2010 08:44 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: ."
Icaria
Member since:
2010-06-19

since [a] UI should always optimize the common case
So if you've got a hw keyboard stuck out the side of your phone, that doesn't automatically become 'the common case'?

my assumption being that you fundamentally can't make an UI good at both portrait and landscape modes, that at some point in designing the UI you have to favor either portrait or landscape mode in order to go further, or to introduce inconsistent behaviors depending if the phone is in one mode or the other
Well, that's a pretty shitty assumption.

The problem is not that, but rather that at equal diagonal size and encumbrance, a wide screen provides less height.
Technically, you don't get equal diag measurements and encumbrance. The further away you move from a square screen, the smaller the area of the screen. As for a lack of vertical screen space, that only seems to be true for netbooks: they introduced 600-line monitors long after UI and web designers settled on 768 as the defacto minimum. As a stopgap, check out a little utility on source forge called winxmove. Winxmove, along with wizmouse/katmouse and tweakUI/Aero's sloppy focus feature almost make Windows usable.

As for vertical maximise, even without the myriad alt shells out there, you can do that with 7: place the mouse cursor near the top border of a window, wait 'til the icon changes, then double click. It's silly and not very discoverable (I only found out by reading about it) but it is there.

Reply Parent Score: 1