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Originally Posted by kaufman
I think all of these issues, are going to make you crazy. Especially, what's going to happen if one book has tags and another doesn't. Metadata items will not be in the same relative position on a book by book basis. (This might be an argument for having blanks areas where the metadata doesn't exist).
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The position of metadata will be controlled by the order of the list, not by the book. The main question is "what happens if the book doesn't have that metadata?"
The Android natural outcome (that takes the fewest layout parameters) is that if a field isn't there then is takes no space, that the size of a column is determined by the longest value in that column, and that space is allocated between the columns in the group depending on the relative size of each column. Using this "rule", space is allocated as needed on a book by book basis. If there is nothing in a column then the column is not there. If the relative field sizes change from book to book then the column sizes change from book to book. If the user displays tags on the left and a custom genre column on the right then the sizes of the columns for a given book will depend on the sizes of the values for each book.
I can of course fix the column sizes to be each 50%, but that would force empty columns for books that have no information displaying in that column. I am not convinced that this is better than data-sensitive layouts, other than that users might think that varying cell size is weird.
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How about instead of having two columns of metadata, you limit them to one column but have an option to show two columns of books in list view? Then you kill a lot of the dead space on tablets but avoid all of the two columns of metadata complexity.
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I don't see how this would be accepted by users. I assume that you are suggesting that if I have 4 values to display then I display 2 on the left and 2 on the right. That doesn't deal with width, and also makes the position of a given metadata item indeterminate, something you implied above wouldn't be acceptable.
Also, aren't we talking only about list view?