[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
“Why Express Mode ?
“Initially for Moblin 2.1 we tried a more invasive re-working of
the user-experience: called Anjal. That was not uniformly positive,
missing many features (by design), and didn’t have enough time to
mature. As such, it was decided by the MeeGo team that we should
try a new approach. This would take Evolution, and adapt it’s UI
for the netbook screen-size, tweaking all the relevant defaults. We
would merge the best features from Anjal, and then build from
there. The result is some great MeeGo, netbook goodness, despite
being done at high speed over three months.“It is important to realise that ~all netbooks have a 1024×600
screen – giving very, very few pixels – particularly vertically
(most apps are tuned for at a minimum 1024×768) and as such lots of
tweakage was needed to save vertical space. As Linus’ Coding Style
document suggests – vertical space is a non-renewable resource, and
we need to conserve it: just adding scroll-bars is an ugly cheat.
This quest for vspace is nastily exacerbated by the terrible
touch-pads that so many net-books have, meaning we need lots of
extra padding around widgets to avoid them being clicked by
accident.”