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

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

#151

Post by awillen »

As a product manager, my immediate response is... not worth the time.

You've chosen to have a unique setup, which is fine, but your use case represents some absolutely miniscule fraction of users. On top of that, it's not even that websites are unusable, just that they're not ideal.

When you decide to do weird/special/unique stuff, don't expect the world to adapt to you. You can rotate your monitor back or live with it. The idea that companies should spend engineering/QA/PM resources to deal with this is... vain.

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

#152

Post by cptskippy »

falcolas wrote: post #140
DangerousPie wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is almost useless on mobile. Tiny UI elements that are hard to hit, people using code blocks for quotes that cut off after the first few characters, etc

At least it allows for pinch zooming, which is (IMO, of course) an acceptable compromise. Maintain readability for the text while still making it possible to hit the UI elements.

Any site allows pinch zooming if you use Firefox and toggle a setting.

That isn't an acceptable compromise, you end up doing a lot of horizontal scaling to read block quotes and zooming to touch UI elements.

It's not the worst, but it is trivial to do better.

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

#153

Post by pc86 »

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.

> I just want to read stuff from the comfort of my bed with my laptop a few feet away.

That's not what laptops are for.

I think that's a typical snide HN/Stack Overflow-type answer, and I don't mean it rudely, but it does have some bearing on this conversation. What's the intended form factor of a laptop? What are the top 10 intended form factors? I'm not sure "reading from 'a few' [several] feet away, while I'm laying down in bed" is in that top 10 list.

Are there devices better suited to that form factor? I don't know.

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

#154

Post by pc86 »

nofunsir wrote: post #126
altcognito wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imag…

God forbid we use the scroll bar.

Nobody's suggesting we not use it, and honestly I don't even know what this needlessly rude comment means in the context of the larger discussion.

Given that we're increasing the text 2x or 3x, it's an important question whether or not we're also increasing the width of the scrollbar 2x or 3x.

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

#155

Post by sime2009 »

vehemenz wrote: post #57

I think many developers/designers ignore device and dpi detection now. It has become too complicated, and the benefits are too few. @media rules with min-width or max-width is really all you need; just make sure the breakpoints aren't so ridiculous that you serve the "mobile" version of your site to desktop users.

That still doesn't work very well. I have Firefox on one half of my 1440p monitor and vertical tabs down the left side. Web pages I see are tall and narrow, and many fall back to mobile style controls.

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

#157

Post by dstick »

tehbeard wrote: post #134
iamben wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I still very often get "here is the desktop design, here is the mobile design". Depending on who is developing the designs depends how that's going to translate. I have all the time in the world for developers that reflow the page and remove/adjust elements at different breakpoints (based on the design) between 'desktop' and 'mobile' so the experience is good for everyone. Sadly, most people don't bother.

Convincing a client to pay for time to spend checking the design and tweaking it in the space between the breakpoints can be more hassle than it's worth. That said, sane breakpoints can usually avoid unexpected hamburgers on the desktop.

Agreed, Tablet is the only intermediate I consider. The rest is just not worth the time investment.

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

#158

Post by sgerenser »

sn_master wrote: post #131
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…

I can't use HackerNews on my monitor without scaling. If I press Ctrl+0 on Chrome, the site becomes unusable.

So it’s not just me. I think HN is the only site I use that I’ve bothered to configure custom zoom factor for.

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

#159

Post by egypturnash »

jaywalk wrote: post #123
egypturnash wrote: post #99

The “solution” he gives for website devs is to “stop naively using screen resolution”. But the thing is, an iPhone 12’s resolution is 2532‑by‑1170-pixel at 460 ppi - bigger than his 1080×1920.

The iPhone doesn't report it's "real" resolution, though.

His method of taking reported resolution and multiplying by window.devicePixelRatio is designed to work around exactly that.

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

#160

Post by Tagbert »

matsemann wrote: post #111
dahfizz wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Except you're ignoring mobile devices.

No, the say that HN does it works regardless of screen width. If the site were to assign a fixed width, it would conflict with mobile devices.
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