What is the typical way of going about monitor resolution when making a full screen GUI?

Question

I'm making a program that will have a widget that has to be fixed in size, is there an industry standard for smallest resolution width?

What are some common way of dealing with this problem?

Answer 1

For PCs (excluding embedded stuff like handphones, wristwatches, mp3 players, washing machines etc..) the smallest resolution is 640x480 otherwise known as VGA resolution.

There may be some PC-class computers like early Macs, Ataris or TRS-80s with smaller resolutions but nobody uses them nowdays. Conventional wisdom says the smallest monitor width is 640 pixels wide.

In the last 10 years a lot of developers have upped the assumed minimum resolution to 1024x768 otherwise known as XGA (btw, nobody calls them VGA or XGA anymore since the mid 1990s). All graphics card manufactured since 1999 can handle at least 1024 pixels as the minimum width.

768 pixels used to be assumed as the minimum height by a lot of developers in the last 10 years until 3 years ago when Asus invented the Netbook category. Most netbooks have a resolution of 1024x600. So a lot of software cannot fit on netbook screens (much to the annoyance of netbook owners).

Currently (since I'm one of those netbook owners) my own standard minimum is 1024x600, that is, 1024 pixels wide vs 600 pixels high (actually more like 560 pixels because I usually have to account for the menubar and the taskbar).

Note: wikipedia has a nice summary of standard monitor resolutions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_display_resolutions