Display Compatibility

Guidelines on minimum window sizes, designing for different display sizes.

GNOME 3 supports a wide variety of display types, including many sizes of displays, as well as those that can be rotated. It is important to ensure that your application performs well on the full range of these devices.

When designing the visual layout of your application's windows, consider the range of display sizes where it might be used.

Minimum window sizes

Ensure that the content of all application windows can be viewed on these displays, including when large text mode is on. The smallest resolution displays supported by GNOME 3 have resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x720 pixels.

  • Vertical scrolling can be used to fit tall content on small displays. However, avoid using horizontal scrolling.

Half-screen snap

GNOME 3 allows windows to be snapped to occupy half the width of a display. This functionality is useful for using windows alongside each other, and therefore does not need to be supported for windows that are generally used in isolation (a music player is a good example of this).

Windows that you want to be snapped to half a display should have a minimum width of no more than 640 pixels.

Larger displays

Large displays can present their own layout challenges. If a window contains a small amount of content or controls, it can easily be lost if it is maximized on a large display. When presenting text, long lines can be difficult for the human eye to read. There is also the danger of presenting too many content items or too much information, which can be difficult to process.

Depending on the type of content inside a window, there are a number of strategies for ensuring that resizable windows provide a good experience on large displays.

Used fixed or maximum width layouts to ensure than lines of text do not become uncomfortably long. As a rule of thumb, aim to ensure that text lines are no more than 60 characters long (including spaces). Follow the guidance on the lists and grids pages for window scaling.

Not all applications need to follow these approaches - ...

Portrait and landscape

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Design/HIG/DisplayCompatibility (last edited 2014-09-19 16:54:01 by AllanDay)