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If your screen gets broken near an edge or corner, but the rest of it still works, that's nearly as unusable as a screen that doesn't work at all, because most operating systems expect that the whole screen works and will put vital things in the area that is now broken.
Apple popularized the "notch"
in smartphones with the iPhone X, and then a bunch of Android phones copied it. Now Android has operating system-level support for arbitrarily shaped screens. However, AFAIK, the screen shape is set once at the time the phone manufacturer builds their customized version of Android for their phone, and probably remains set until you load another ROM.
I propose to use that mechanism (or the equivalent that may already exist in or be added to other operating systems such as macOS, Windows, and Linux) in a slightly more dynamic way. When your screen breaks, you'll be able to use the non-rectangular screen support to accommodate it.
Simply start up your device into a special mode (by holding down a key combination as it boots), in which it will display instructions for setting the new screen shape. These instructions are displayed quite small, but repeated many times across the whole screen, so that, no matter what part is broken, you can probably still read them.
If your device is a smartphone, tablet, or laptop that has a built-in front-facing camera, just hold it facing a mirror and press the indicated button. It will display white, and possibly red, green, and blue as well, over the whole screen, and take photos of its own screen in the mirror.
If your device is a computer with an external webcam, just take that off the top of the screen and aim it at the screen before pressing the button.
If your device has no camera, you can use a standalone camera or phone. Just take a photo of the broken screen displaying each color, load those onto a flash drive, and stick that into the device with a broken screen.
To make clear the orientation of the photos, an asymmetric pattern can be added to the sequence of flat colors displayed, such as a grid of tiny spirals. The pattern can also be varied across the height and width of the screen, to make clear where on the screen a given pixel is, if all of the corners are broken.
Once the device has the photos of its screen, it will analyze them to detect where the corners of the screen are (or where the center of the pattern is) and what part of the screen is broken. Then it shows you what area of the screen is still usable, with a draggable border in case you want to adjust the shape. There's also an option to use the largest rectangular area, if a corner broke, to maintain better compatibility with current apps that expect a rectangular screen. Once you've decided what shape to use, the device sets its own screen shape to the chosen shape, and reboots.
Now it's more usable, in that everything on the screen avoids the broken area, because that's no longer considered part of the screen.
N/A [2018-12-18]
Broken Arrow
https://en.wikipedi...nology#Broken_Arrow
For anybody unfamiliar [notexactly, Dec 19 2018]
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This is a really great idea - I love the idea of technology incrementally adapting to its defects and frailties as it gets older - as people do - rather than either 'working' or 'not working'.
(On reading the title, I thought 'Broken Screen Accommodation' might be housing units lit entirely by broken displays scavenged from broken laptops and tablets - not such a good idea as the one actually posted) |
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What about accommodating Broken Arrows ? |
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The natural terrain seems to do that all too effectively… |
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Goes out to get a hammer to break screen to see if
this actually works. |
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You can test it nondestructively by putting opaque tape over
part of your screen. |
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Or to test it without getting adhesive on the screen, you could stick an identical bit of tape on each of your corneas, in the same relative positions. |
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Call me thicko if you will, but what's Broken Arrow got
to do with a screen? |
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Try shooting an arrow at your screen. If the screen is stronger than the arrow, the arrow will break. If the arrow is stronger than the screen, try again with another device. |
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What if the arrow is not only exactly the same strength as the screen, but approaches it in progressively smaller steps of (d - Delta-d) such that the screen and arrow never actually come into contact ? |
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After an infinite number of such steps (occupying a finite amount of time due to the suspicious underhand influence of Reality and Mathematics), both will break. |
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Cool. We will willingly pay a dollar to watch someone shoot arrows at iPhoneys. |
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As someone who enjoyed the pastime of toxophily, the
arrow would bounce off a strong screen. |
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Bodkin-head crossbow quarrel ? |
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On most Android phones now, hidden in the developer
settings, is an option to simulate a notch on screen for
purposes of app testing. The Android system allows up to
2 notches to be simulated on screen at any given time (if I
correctly recall a video I saw on the topic from MKBHD), so
if your screen happens to be cracked in an area that this
developer support setting allows to be covered with a
notch, that MAY be all you need to do... I'll tinker around
with it on my Pixel 2 XL and see what I can do. |
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Ok, so the option is labeled "display cutout" and there are 4
options showing on my device, which means a rooted
device should gain even greater functionality. I think there's
an even more applicable setting, however, in the
accessibility options, which shrinks the whole display
down for one handed use. Given that it supports left and
right handed modes, as well as landscape support, that
too may provide the functionality you're searching for. |
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Update after searching: SOME Android phones have One-
handed Mode. iPhone calls it "Reachability". |
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Toxophily; good word. Gonna be a hard one to work into conversation. |
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//Bodkin-head crossbow quarrel |
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Do they? Have they tried the Acas Helpline? It's 0300
123 1100. |
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But seriously, it sounds like Anasazi pointy heads stuff. |
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// Have they tried the Acas Helpline? It's 0300 123 1100. // |
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They couldn't see the point. |
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// But seriously, it sounds like Anasazi pointy heads stuff // |
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Wasn't that the Maya/Aztec pre-Columbian central American lot ? Wooden boards strapped to foreheads and stuff ? |
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Indeedy, so the Anasazi had a resource able to pierce
the bone/animal skin armour of competing tribes. |
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Admittedly the ballista would have to pretty big to
launch citizens at the enemy, the upside is they'd be
quite aerodynamic, unlike the round(ish) skulls of
the
enemies. |
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I feel a great disturbance...as if a thousand
researchers of the North American Archaic period
were all
face-palming at the same time... |
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They want to watch out, they could end up with flat foreheads and pointy skulls that way ... |
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