[Sugar-devel] prevent screen rotation in a sugar activity?

[Frederick Grose]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 3:50 PM, Bakhtiar Mikhak <mikhak at mediamods.com>wrote:

>
> On Dec 10, 2010, at 5:14 PM, James Cameron wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 04:29:31PM -0500, Erik Blankinship wrote:
>
> It is sometimes a designer's prerogative to present their work in one
> format.
>
> Numerous examples are available on the iPhone and android markets.
>
>
> It is sometimes a platform designer's perogative to enforce human
> interface guidelines and require applications to support certain
> behaviours.
>
> Is it possible to override or be notified of a rotation signal?
>
>
> No, not without taking control of components outside the scope of a
> Sugar activity.  You're welcome to try that, but the problems that occur
> are:
>
> 0.  installation will require root access, which is not available to
> some users due to deployment team policy,
>
> 1.  the API will keep changing, instead of remaining relatively static
> in the case of the Sugar Activity API,
>
> 2.  there are multiple build versions to test against,
>
> 3.  there is a higher risk of breaking something later.
>
>
> If I am reading the current version of HIG,
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Sugar_Interface/Input_Systems#Screen_Rotation, correctly,
> it is not a *requirement* for developers to implement a portrait layout
> for their activity:
>
> Screen Rotation
> While in Hand-held mode, the laptops support screen rotation; by pressing a
> small button on the bezel of the display, the interface will rotate 90
> degrees to provide a portrait layout of the currently active activity. Just
> as any activity can implement Hand-held mode, those which can benefit from a
> vertical aspect ratio may also implement this feature, and we encourage
> developers to take advantage of this functionality. The Read activity serves
> as a prime example of the usefulness of such a feature, since a vertical
> layout is well suited to displaying a single page from a book. This is just
> the type of activity one might want to do in Hand-held mode, and by
> providing two orientations a greater number of use cases can be covered.
> In the current revisions of the laptops, its important to note that the
> buttons for interacting with Hand-held mode are slightly less accessible
> when the laptops are held vertically. For this reason, activities that
> require heavy or frequent use might not be best suited for this mode.
> However, OLPC is working hard on introducing touch-screen technology in the
> near future, which will nearly eliminate the dependency on the physical
> buttons, expanding the possibilities as every activity can take advantage of
> screen rotation. Therefore, even if screen rotation doesn't make sense for
> the first version of your activity, please construct your interface in such
> a way as to allow future adaptation to this new and potentially useful
> functionality.
>
> I therefore think it is worth considering if the control over if/how one's
> activity takes advantage of screen rotation should be exposed through the
> Sugar API.
>
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>
>
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