Re: MS Silverlight Clues

Just keeping this thread vibrant to tick off Kevin. ;)


"Peter McMurray" wrote:
Screen Size has a great deal to do with how much will fit across a page
without scroll bars etc and how much is displayed in a legible manner.

I'm afraid not. Resolution is the factor that determines what will
fit. This is independent of screen size. You may be running in
800x600 resolution which may be the limit for the video card or
monitor on your laptop.

Personally I would ban any screen other than 15" being used by testers as
this is the norm out there.

Incorrect again. The average screen these days is between 17" and 24"
with the normal resolution being 1024x768. This is supported by all
monitors and video cards produced in the last 8 years or more. My 15
year old godson just bought himself a laptop with a 17 monitor -
they're quite affordable these days. More people are running much
higher res these days and even multiple monitors.

Have a look here for an idea of what's available:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vector_Video_Standards2.svg

There is no absolute like testing on a 15 inch monitor - that misses
the big picture by a mile. Developers need to understand their
audience and target their UI to that audience.
- What about people with large monitor space? They have money to
spend, they obviously spent it on a large/hi-res monitor, so you don't
want to tick them off by cramping them into a little box for no good
reason and make them work harder to read your site.
- What about handicap/accessibility?
- What about switches for people who are color blind - there are
various types of color blindness, and different types affect males
more than females?
- What about portable devices now that more people have iPhone,
Blackberry, and now Android?
- And yes, what about grandma running 800x600 on a 15" monitor at
120DPI? Which BTW, you probably don't need your install disks, just
answer yes and reboot whenever you wish. You can switch back to 96DPI
just as easily if the drivers aren't there.

As you see, there are no absolutes. If you do have a site like CBA
that has a widely diversified audience then 1024x768 is the standard
and they should offer a user profile switch that allows visitors to
change their CSS to suit their preferences.

Just because something can be made to fit does
not make it legible, as for colours well coloured backgrounds are a recipe
for disaster.

It's a bit bold to lump all colours into one category. Should all
sites be white? Black? Did you mean multi-colour or image
backgrounds? Sure, some colored backgrounds qualify sites for the
"websites that suck" award.


Currently they are trying to get the screens to work on Apple and therefore
they will accidentally fix Chrome which they had not realised. The
disastrous display of drop down menus is intriguing. They come up all over
the place then they are followed by the data then more selection blocks etc.

As long as you're talking to them you can inform them that it's easy
to detect the browser and some settings when a user first requests a
page. Based on this they can change their CSS dynamically to suit the
browser. Sites do this all the time with JavaScript though there are
still many pages that are generated on the server but still have the
confounded "if(browser=IE)" code in the client. Detect the browser on
the server and only upload the code that is supposed to work for them.
If something doesn't look right, it doesn't affect people with other
browsers.


my screens are set to whatever is the default most likely to be used by my
clients.

Well, there are free utilities that allow you to see your work as it
would appear in different browsers, and you can easily change your res
by right clicking the desktop. I don't think it's necessary to live
in backwardland just because you have a couple backward clients. And
at some point for the few who prefer to remain back there, you have to
decide if it costs you more to develop for those backward few than to
make sure your offering appeals to the enlightened many (like anyone
who has purchased a monitor or video card in the last 8 years).

I once made a comment here or in some presentation where I suggested
that it would cost less to buy 17" monitors for clients than it does
to write software for their low-res screens. I've since heard from a
couple developers (can't remember who, anyone here?) who said they do
just that now - and their clients love the hardware upgrade to
eco-friendly 17" flat screen monitors (for about $100 each) that comes
with their nice new/modern software.

There are two questions here. First, are the people who aren't going
to spend $100 for a new monitor really the people who you are asking
to buy your new software? I'd say that's the wrong audience and it's
going to cost you too much time and money to try to sell to them.
Second, if you develop to a low-end monitor, what sort of impression
does that set for people who do actually have a monitor from this
decade when they're comparing your offering to others?

At some point developers need to set baselines for their audience,
perhaps providing for free or fee the components required to use their
software properly. I'm not saying you should write for 2560x2048 but
800x600 is a compromise too far in the other direction. Do some
research, find out what the industry standard is, and get your
prospects and clients to conform to that. For those who don't fit the
standard you have to ask yourself what the ROI is for the extra effort
required for that audience. If you lose money by appealing to a
certain audience don't work on code, work on finding more people who
will pay you for complying with standards.


Rule No 1: Only computers make mistakes never operators.
Rule No 2: There are a fair number of arrogant programmers out there that
program to their favourite platform and blame everyone else when it does not
work properly.

Hmm, you should read that Rule #2 a few times and let it sink in.

T
.

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