[chaley]

Originally Posted by kaufman

I like it for big screens, but perhaps on smaller devices one column would be better.

Or, how about if the user only had left selected (or hide), you could automagically expand left to the whole width.

Or maybe left, right, full and hide. Then you could have things like tags go all the way across, but show publisher and publication date on the same line.

Unfortunately we are starting to get into the capabilities of Android layouts.

The first thing to note is that unless one goes to a lot of trouble, Android does the screen layout itself after all the information is added. The programmer tells android the relative positions of the information and the system lays it out respecting those instructions. Thus, if we are doing a two-column layout, we would simply say which column a field is in and the order of the lines. If a column has no information it wouldn't appear. If a field has no information then it wouldn't appear.

There is no straightforward way to have some lines consume 1 column and some lines consume two columns. It can clearly be done, but if one does so then it is up to the programmer to do *all* the layout. This gets us back to some kind of GUI layout designer, which is far beyond your proposal. The way around this would be to create a three-cell layout: full, then a two-column layout below it. I could do that.

Do note that full would equal left if there is no right, or right if there is no left.

This might get complicated for users who wanted things on the same line (like publisher and publication date).

You just raised the ante. The beauty of the original proposition was that there was no compound field display, which is why it is so attractive to me.

How about make them do it in order? If a right follows a left, they are shown on the same line. If two lefts are in a row, then the first one gets the whole line. That makes the results somewhat more deterministic since it is less reliant on the size of the results for a specific book.

For me as a user, this is difficult to understand. There is an implication that lines are left empty "sometimes", such as if I say "left, right, left, left, right". There is an implication that a left and a right have some semantic relationship. There is an implication that a field is displayed even if it is empty. I think it is easier to understand that the lefts are displayed in order in the left and the rights are displayed in order in the right, assuming that the field contains something. There is no attempt to connect them. Of course, if a user does "left, right, left, right" then the "order" rule would present the information together, as long as the the field is actually defined for the book. If the first "right" is empty then it wouldn't show, lifting the second "right" to the first line.

I guess I thought that if the user said they wanted small covers, they are saying that they want more books per page. You are probably right that if they say they want lots of information, they are overriding that decision.

Yes. You choose what you want to see and CC shows it.

I bet it will look cool when the extra information blinks in, but how will you know how big to make the area for the book if you don't do the processing of the extra information?

Android takes care of this. It doesn't render the cell until it has all the information that goes into it.