I’ve noticed this problem a few times, and most every time it’s had to do with a dialog from a Java program. Image you’re using Eclipse and you’ve installed the Android SDK Plugin. You now want to make a new Android Project, but you’re on a netbook with a 600px high screen, so you’ll be presented with this:
You cannot create the project because you haven’t selected a target for the project. However you will not be able to select a target either. You can see that the target selection should happen in the “Build Target” section of the dialog, but this has been shortened to hide the elements within. In the infinite wisdom of the GUI layer, you also cannot tab into the elements that are now not displayed; normally that’d be 3 tabs away, but you’ll find yourself skipping right to the “Application name” field.
If you’d had a 660px high screen you would see the correct dialog (and a tiny scrollbar in the target list at 640px):
The proper solution to a dialog that cannot hold all the elements placed on it would be a scrollbar. For whatever reason this solution must be manually coded and is not handled by the GUI layer, despite the fact that the layer does do something automatically, namely hiding elements.
If only you could slide the dialog down then enlarge it to more that 600px high. But here Windows stops you, as having a window which is taller than the current screen height also goes against its assumptions. Which is too bad. I’ve often wanted to do just that with a whole assortment of windows; EG on a browser so you can ALT-PrintScreen the whole of the web page.
Netbooks currently almost always ship with a 600px high screen. But even previous to this innovation 480px was a reasonable minimum screen height (though if you wanted to build a hypercard stack for a Mac Plus you’d be looking at 342px). So it surprises me that A) there isn’t a better way to handle reducing a dialogs size than hiding some of it’s elements, and B) this isn’t something that can be automatically tested for. Shouldn’t there be some developer’s JVM kit that has the option to “run as though the screen size is 640x480” without having to go through the pain of changing your resolution or running in a VM? Is this some kind of missed enterprise product opportunity?
