Adaptive GTK Widgets

Description

Make all the widgets adaptive!

We live in a multi-form-factor world: desktops, tablets, phones, and more and GNOME can be on any or all of them but not all GTK widgets respond well to changes between these form factors and it detracts from the user experience and usefulness of GNOME. Our goal should be to have GTK apps respond effectively and adapt to all form factors.

The goal of adaptiveness is not limited just to hardware form factors though, but should also be an important consideration for how application windows resize, tackling how GTK apps respond to window resizing should cover how they perform on different devices–a small application window would be analogous to a phone.

Apps should look good at any size!

To avoid GTK applications looking bad and functioning poorly across form factors applying some of the principles of responsive design at the toolkit level will go a long way towards achieving a future of adaptive apps.

Reference Materials

• Microsoft: Responsive design techniques
• Google: Responsive Web Design Basics
• Apple, iOS HIG: Adaptivity and Layout

Goals

• review which GTK widgets are adaptive
• update GTK widgets that have poor responsiveness
• make the GTK stylesheet (Adwaita) responsive

Scope

• GTK
• All of GNOME

People on charge & contact

• Sam Hewitt (@snwh)
• Tobias Bernard (@bertob)
• Adrien Plazas (@aplazas)

Instructions to achieve the goals

Label for tracking the initiative

9. Initiative: AdaptiveGTK

Text for the initiative issue in projects

/label ~"9. Initiative: AdaptiveGTK"

List of projects & tasks

Needs to be made adaptive

• GtkFileChooserDialog
• GtkHeaderBar
• GtkInfoBar
• GtkMessageDialog

Good to Go

• all small standalone widgets: switches, buttons, etc.

How can I help

Test GTK widgets or find issues with widgets in applications and contribute to the above list.