The Nokia Developer Newsletter this week (02.28.06) features scalable screen drawing as its lead article, and describes what that is in these words:
Effective scalable-UI design requires that each object in the UI be located relative to something else. For example, instead of locating an object 50 pixels from the left edge of the screen, developers might locate it 25 percent of the distance from the left edge to the right edge of the display. Or they might locate the upper-left corner of an object two pixels to the right of some other object.
Wow! That means because the relationships of visual objects are relative, the meaning of what is displayed is liberated from single-medium tyranny! You can’t take a picture or chart on, for example, the single page 325 of a printed book and in a heartbeat display it across the double spread of pages 198-199 — and do so larger to fill the pages in horizontal format instead of vertical, as it was on page 325. The implications of being able to accomplish that interoperability through object scaling are HUGE for the future of learning as well as the gaming shown in the Nokia illustration. (Gaming, of course, is learning too — as Marc Prensky says powerfully in his just released book.)
The power of object scaling for delivering content transcends any specific subject or application. In the book comparison, object scaling would mean the illustration from page 325 could fly a clone off its page in a book on to any other medium’s graphical interface from a tiny mobile phone screen, to a classroom projector, to a billboard at Times Square — and, of course, to another book or other print medium of any size. The content of the illustration would convey the same essential meaning and message to a human observer in each instance.
Perhaps most significant is the smooth sailing object scaling predicts for user interfaces of Internet content. When it is displayed in object scaled format, content can be used on a mobile device, a laptop and/or a large stationary computer screen. Garden walls will crumble of their own obsolescence on that happy day.
Nokia provides some practical instruction for scalable graphics in a white paper (which includes the above illustration) here.
