[Development] Revisiting high-DPI configuration options

[Samuel Stirtzel]

2016-07-19 12:48 GMT+02:00 Ulf Hermann <ulf.hermann at qt.io>:
>
>> I'm still entirely sure that "let the user decide" was a better way to
>> settle how big the page should be, what fonts and colour-schemes to use;
>> by all means let the author give hints and suggestions to the
>> presentation system, but let the user have the final say.  I shall like
>> the look of your document better if it's in a font I've chosen because I
>> find it easier or nicer to read; I shall like the appearance of your
>> page better if the overall colour scheme fits in with my desktop
>> environment; I shall like your web-site better if it adapts itself to my
>> tastes - and letting it do so spares you the need to agonise over which
>> entirely subjective details appeal to a bigger audience.
>
>
> I totally agree with this as long as we're talking about documents - mostly
> consisting of text, to be read top to bottom (or some other direction,
> depending on locale). It gets hairy if we're talking about graphical
> applications where text only plays a minor role, and most of the visual
> elements have size constraints. It's very hard to have all those visual
> elements and their interactions scale smoothly to any dimensions or color
> schemes the user may choose. So, for those applications the designer usually
> chooses a few predefined UI styles, and tries to prevent the user from
> messing with those, as the result of that messing would only look bad and
> glitchy.
>

No offense, but that sounds very biased towards a designers standpoint.
Applications like the Winamp media player for example have shown that
user designed styles can very well benefit software that is not even
close to a document viewer.
Even if some user created style would look bad (based on opinions),
how would anyone blame the application for being customizable?

>From a technical standpoint it may not be trivial to develop a scaling
user interface, but OTOH the gained usability may be worth it (also it
saves the developers from the DPI hassle).
The topic may be as well compared to HTML, where the users can scale
the user interface and have utilities at hands that are capable of
changing the appearance of every website to their personal flavor.



-- 
Regards
Samuel