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Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#101

Post by oblio »

dahfizz wrote: post #59
timw4mail wrote: post #15

The real problem is that designing for different screen sizes, especially with responsive design, is very difficult. For my personal projects, screen size is the factor used to determine layout. Mobile/tablet/laptop/desktop is irrelevant. My goal with smaller viewports is to make the layout as similar as possible, without the user having to scroll horizontally. Because I don't want to change the layout too much, I do…

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

And yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar.

There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS.

There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in real life. I've gotten used to it but it still sucks.

The contrast is super low.

HN is an MVP for a super minimalist forum that wouldn't fly for any other kind of community except for the intersection between hackers and wannabe entrepreneurs.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#102

Post by dahfizz »

matsemann wrote: post #79
dahfizz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

Lolno. I have to make Firefox take only half the screen, otherwise HN will render wiiide lines with text. I cannot read lines with >200 characters, then I miss the mark when jumping to the next line when it's multiple lines in a paragraph. HN is also the only site I have zoomed in on desktop, as the font is unreadably small on high dpi devices. And on mobile I find it impossible to hit the upvote arrow.

I can read long lines just fine, and I like that the full width of the viewport is used.

Because HN is designed so simply, you can trivially get the layout you want (half width lines) and I can also get the layout I want.

If HN instead tried to artificially limit the viewport in code (which is something lots of web developers do), they would break all sorts of other use cases for no reason. That's what I mean when I say websites tend to overcomplicate their design.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#103

Post by ortusdux »

jefftk wrote: post #48

Sites are not detecting a portrait screen and deciding that they're displaying on a phone. Someone who switches their monitor to portrait, or resizes a window to be taller than it is wide, is still going to get the desktop view. In this case the author is scaling their resolution, and so their browser is presenting itself to sites as 720px wide. Sites see that and show a layout optimized for a screen of that width. T…

The A.V. Club took flak for turning all their lists into slide-shows on desktop. Their response was to tell people to adjust their browser width to force the mobile view. When you load a page, it preloads the assets for both views and switches based solely on window width. If you play an embedded youtube video and try and toggle full screen mode, the site reverts back to slide-show and breaks the video.

example: https://tv.avclub.com/the-hunt-is-on-with-clarice-the-equali...

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#104

Post by pantalaimon »

matsemann wrote: post #79
dahfizz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

Lolno. I have to make Firefox take only half the screen, otherwise HN will render wiiide lines with text. I cannot read lines with >200 characters, then I miss the mark when jumping to the next line when it's multiple lines in a paragraph. HN is also the only site I have zoomed in on desktop, as the font is unreadably small on high dpi devices. And on mobile I find it impossible to hit the upvote arrow.

That's why i like to keep an 19" TFT screen as a third display on my desk, most websites render perfectly on it and i can always have a browser in the foreground.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#105

Post by Robotbeat »

nobleach wrote: post #93
dahfizz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

Sure. Now let's say you're shopping for a brand new rug for your living room. Are you going to buy it from a site the looks like HackerNews? If so, I'd venture to say you're in the minority. A used rug from Craigslist, perhaps, but a brand new rug costing hundreds, you're going to want a site that looks VERY professional.

So you’re saying “professional == follows modern design fads” as a proxy for how legitimate a site is. And maybe you’re right that is a somewhat useful (if unreliable) proxy for legitimateness, but it’s not an argument that it’s good design.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#106

Post by jordache »

the author must be aware that his use case (vertically oriented monitor) is such an obscure demographic, that almost no company will invest in time to optimize this experience. His complaining about this situation is pure self-centered arrogance.

There is effectively zero benefit of optimizing for this use case.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#107

Post by altcognito »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #80
jefftk wrote: post #48

Sites are not detecting a portrait screen and deciding that they're displaying on a phone. Someone who switches their monitor to portrait, or resizes a window to be taller than it is wide, is still going to get the desktop view. In this case the author is scaling their resolution, and so their browser is presenting itself to sites as 720px wide. Sites see that and show a layout optimized for a screen of that width. T…

This doesn't address the author's central argument, which is that websites need an effortless way of letting fonts become bigger without affecting the entire layout. I've wanted it too. I don't really care if some text gets cut off on headers and looks weird, I just want to read stuff from the comfort of my bed with my laptop a few feet away.

This was tried in the mid-late oughts was it not? It is nearly impossible to logically derive what should increase in sized and what should not.

Should the space given to sidebars increase? Should those sidebars disappear? What about headers and footers? How will the overfloat be treated? A single line, double lines? What about captions underneath images? How do you handle text that happens to be embedded within images themselves, or even on top of images?

"I don't care if headers look weird"

It goes beyond things looking weird, it really does break websites.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#108

Post by planb »

dahfizz wrote: post #59
timw4mail wrote: post #15

The real problem is that designing for different screen sizes, especially with responsive design, is very difficult. For my personal projects, screen size is the factor used to determine layout. Mobile/tablet/laptop/desktop is irrelevant. My goal with smaller viewports is to make the layout as similar as possible, without the user having to scroll horizontally. Because I don't want to change the layout too much, I do…

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

What? I can’t count how often I accidentally downvoted a post because I can’t hit the correct arrow on mobile!

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#109

Post by thepratt »

oblio wrote: post #101
dahfizz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

And yet quotes don't wrap to any specific size, so you end up with an awful horizontal scroll bar. There is no way to format your text, even stuff that's available since MS Word 1.0, such as bold or italic. Even science papers have formatting so I don't buy the "overuse of styles" BS. There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users (or mods!) to make this place feel more like a community in re…

If you weren't aware https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc may be helpful. There are some basic options for text formatting on HN, including italics and bold.

Re: Just because I have a vertical screen doesn’t mean I’m on a phone

#110

Post by alpaca128 »

Spooks wrote: post #68
dahfizz wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real real problem is that so many sites overcomplicate their design. HN works beautifully on any window / screen size.

HN is a pretty minimal site though - it is just a message board.

Almost all websites are pretty minimal in terms of their features, but they're built as if they were an in-browser image editor.

Reddit is barely more than HN with pictures and a LOT of bloat inbetween. It could be as minimal as 4chan-style imageboards if you add voting and a slightly different comment view.

Youtube is just a tiled list of thumbnails or an embedded video player followed by a list of thumbnails. It could work 100% without JS outside of the video controls. Instead it's a huge, slow mess. It's also inconsistent; in my case it scales the list of videos from subscriptions to about 50% of the browser window's width, leaving a chunk of empty space on the sides. The startpage with basically the same layout always uses the full width.

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