Plus42 Equations, Preview Release

[Thomas Okken]

(01-16-2022 03:01 AM)johanw Wrote:  Now the difficult question: how about the landscape skins? Or landscape mode at all? Could the screen area get put in 2-column mode?

It looks like most of the landscape skins on my site could be modified using the same procedure. Only the ones that put something next to the display are a problem, which unfortunately includes SGS-L, which I use as the built-in landscape skin in the Android and iOS versions, and HP-Mega-42. But the others could be stretched automatically. All that would be needed is to add a hint to the layout file, which strip can be used for tiling, i.e. just provide two y coordinates, indicating where to make the cut and how many vertical pixels can safely be tiled.

The code changes to do this in the Plus42 shells aren't actually very complicated. I just haven't figured out yet how to deal with this in terms of letting the user control the screen size interactively. I'll think about that after the basic, static, big screen support is done, since that needs to be done anyway.

There's no danger of Plus42 mistakenly using a landscape skin in 2-column mode. When Android and iOS are in landscape mode, to an app this looks like the screen is now really a landscape screen, so the coordinate axes are rotated to match the new orientation. This makes landscape mode easy to support, the developer just has to deal with how the layout has to be made to fit, but not with how to address the physical screen pixels; that last part is handled by the OS.