Terry,
Thanks for the example. That's what I had I mind but without the added flourish of the popup tab. Numeric value appears when you need it and quietly slips into the night when you don't. FWIW, it works on my PlayBook but the tab occasionally wants to disappear before I've finished moving the slider.
W84no1,
I was afraid of that. The UI expands to the point of becoming awkward. A button that's a thousand pixels wide is an atypical widget. The thermostat has lost containment and it's parts have spilled out. Is there any way to restrict the maximum horizontal width? Can the widgets sit within a "carrier", or canvas, whose size can expand horizontally by a fixed percentage but no further? Or no expansion at all?
Chuck,
From Wikipedia:
Criticism is the practice of judging the merits and faults of something or someone in an intelligible (or articulate) way.
If anyone wants to criticize my criticism, I welcome it.
FWIW
The stock MiniBrowser supported one UI and it was ppc (Pocket PC). Rob Brun made a copy of the MiniBrowser, tweaked it and created xBrowser or simply XB. He did it at a time when Premise was a live product and new versions were being released. Modifying MiniBrowser was a bad idea because a new release would potentially overwrite one's modifications. More recently, Chuck made a second copy of MiniBrowser and customized it for the iPhone.
Three copies of the same code seemed inefficient. Premise was no longer being updated so I set out to integrate XB and iPhone into MiniBrowser. Along the way I cleaned up the code, added support for more objects, cleaned up the UI, and put a touch of extensibility in. The result was a unified codebase that could produce three different appearances. Actually, the three UI's were very similar, it was the same codebase after all, and simply the size of the icon grid varied from one to the other (and icon set).
Today, I'd scrap all three UI's in a heartbeat and trade them in for just one. The focus should be faithful to MiniBrowser's original purpose, namely create a UI for a handheld PC, a mobile device. I feel the focus should be to support smartphone screens. When viewed with a higher-resolution device, it should either retain its original size or increase slightly (a little extra whitespace) but not scale to the limits of available resolution.
I like the idea of an intelligent MiniBrowser that detects the available canvas size and delivers more widgets if suitable. Definitely something to consider for a future version. To allow for this capability in the future, today's MiniBrowser must ensure its widgets don't expand and occupy all available space.
