locale preflet windows size to large

[leszek]

The locale preflet window size is way too large for smaller netbook lcds. Resizing should be implemented. Perhaps trying to switch from listview to a dropdown listbox (also called optionbox sometimes) for choosing language and country can fix this issue and make the ui much more clean.

[pulkomandy]

An important feature of the preflet is to choose not one, but multiple languages sorted by order of preference. This way, if an application is not translated to your first preferred language, it will not fallback directly to english, but to your second preferred one. I don't see a convenient way to do this using a dropdown, and the list is probably too big to do it anyway (I don't like big dropdowns). The window is of course too large, even for big screens. This is a known bug but I'm not good enough in layout system programming to get it right. Help welcome.

[HaikuBot]

I think need make it more compact and fix interface (see attachments on which marked what need to fix).

Can anybody help to PulkoMandy with preflet?

[jonas.kirilla]

I can take a stab at it.

[jonas.kirilla]

I'm still working on it. I've got a horizontal layout of the Date/Time/Numbers/Currency, but it's still huge of course. I'm going to try breaking it up into tabs, but it'll take me a few more days. Also doing some code clean-up.

[pulkomandy]

The reason I did not go for tabs was there is already a lin e of tabs (language/country), and having two rows just did not seem right.

Well, anyway, thanks for working on it :)

[Disreali]

Although some progress has been made since this ticket was submitted, the preflet is still to big for even regular VGA 640x480 resolution. This makes it problematic for new Haiku users to figure out how to close the preflet. Making the window, including the tab, smaller than 640x480 would be a step in the right direction.

Attaching screen capture of Locale from a fresh install before I changed the resolution away from 640x480.

[axeld]

To be honest, even smartphones have a higher resolution nowadays. I don't really see the point in trying to get it any smaller than 640x480 -- really everyone should have more than 800x600 for more than a decade now. Besides, the culprit is the second panel "Formatting".

[Disreali]

I would agree except for the fact that when I do a fresh install on my system, the resolution defaults to 640x480 using the VESA driver. I think it would be foolish to assume that mine is only system that does this. I know that one can simply use ALT+Q to quit things, but new users would not and may panic since there would be no visible way of re-sizing the window or quiting.

[axeld]

Ah, that sounds indeed problematic. Do you have a ticket somewhere with a syslog of yours? I could imagine that most of these cases should be fixable. And then, having it open in 640x480 does not sound like it could leave a positive impression anyhow -- but are you able to switch the resolution with "Screen"?

[Disreali]

I have not problem changing the the resolution with 'Screen'. It is just that the Locale pref is earlier in the list of prefs, and I tend to forget to switch the resolution first.

Also, as 640x480 seems to be the default resolution for VESA on first boot, it would be best to make Locale fit within that resolution.

I was not able to find a ticket with a full syslog from this system, so I will attach one to this ticket.

[axeld]

No, 640x480 is not the default resolution for VESA - IIRC it would use 1024x768 if there is no EDID information. However, in your case, your monitor asks for that resolution, and the VESA driver obeys; you're obviously not alone with this, but you can thank your monitor's manufacturer for the poor end result -- your monitor is obviously rather old.

In any case, I think it isn't too hard to detect such cases, and use a better default resolution in that case. This doesn't fit this ticket anymore, though. I've opened #7946 to track this.

[pulkomandy]

The locale preflet fits 800x600, which looks ok to me. Closing this.