Announcing another early Android build for XO-4

[James Cameron]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 10:04:59AM -0700, Yioryos Asprobounitis wrote:
> Obviously your eyesight is better than mine but this is not the
> point.

I needed to use glasses for best reading of that text, but I am not
the target market for the device.  It needs testing with a child.

> In this picture [1] from Github with Boat and Chrome browsers at
> 120% text zoom, you can see that the README text is at comparable
> size but everything else is smaller in Chrome and actually the same
> size as at 100% zoom.

I agree.  I don't think there is any standard that the browsers must
comply with for the size of text.

http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/android-2014-04-25/shot0019.png is a
microscope photograph of the age column of the file list shown by
Chrome.  The text is "14 days ago", and at this magnificiation you can
see very little contrast.

http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/android-2014-04-25/shot0014.png is a
photograph of the README text.  Still, the contrast is not as much as
it could be.

I did these shots to see if I could find any evidence of mistakes of
subpixel hinting, which may assume a different layout of the LCD
pixels.

The choice by Github to use such a low contrast is unfortunate, but I
don't know of any way to adapt to that in Chrome in a fashion that
won't break other sites.

Chrome is needed by our customer for this build, so we have
considerations other than font readability.  I'm glad you can choose
an alternate browser.

> BTW, how did you get the screenshot? The Power-Button+X-gamekey does
> not appear to work in this build (unless if the screenies are
> "hidden" somewhere?)

You can't really miss the response to the keys; it is noisy with
visual animation.

If you see a volume control bar appear, you pressed the keys in the
wrong order.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Android/Screenshots updated with:

To take a screenshot on an XO-4 with Android:

  *   press the power button and then X game key and hold them for a
      second, then release,

  *   a sound is played, and an animation of the screenshot,

  *   the screenshot is available in a file browser or gallery,

It won't work if the X game key is pressed before the power button.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/