Ideal screen rotation

Dave Ball openmoko at underhand.org
Tue Nov 10 17:11:40 CET 2009


Warren Baird wrote:
> perhaps the landscape / portrait flag should just contrain the 
> rotation?   So if you flip the phone 180 degrees, you get the 
> 'expected' behaviour, but if you just flip it 90 degrees nothing changes?

Given that these properties are for the orientation an application 
requests (to the WM) should ideally be used, I'm not sure how the actual 
rotation would help?  Working from rotation would also complicate the 
behaviour on devices that are normally landscape - such as the Nokia N900. 

What I'm suggesting is that the application just says "landscape" or 
"portrait", and then the WM would decide the most appropriate way to 
orient the screen for that device.

If an application doesn't request either landscape or portrait, then the 
WM would rotate the screen according to the device orientation, through 
each of the positions the device could be held (including inverted).  So 
the WM definitely needs to know the actual orientation of the device 
(such as from the FSO api), but I think the application itself only 
needs to request Landscape, Portrait or neither.


Dave



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