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

shkspr.mobi

181–190 of 399 posts

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

#181
post #162
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, now do bold ;-)

You mean 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀?

There is no formatting support for it, it seems you can use Unicode bold formats or something. Doesn't seem approachable or trivial...

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

#182
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.

If desktop + mobile make up >95% of your audience it's hard to justify the cost of creating a third set of rules for the rest.

That makes sense on the surface, but you should design for all possibilities, current and future.

I learned this lesson the hard way. The client was on desktop. The users were 40% phones. Everything was great for months and months.

Then one day the owner of the company that owned the company tried to look at the web site on her grandkid's iPad. Fan met shit that day.

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

#183
post #73
post #64

Ironically, the author of dpi.lv ( https://lea.verou.me/ ) doesn't even bother to have a "desktop-friendly" site. On desktop everything (font, header, images, buttons) is huge and ~50% of the vertical space is wasted. Not the best calling card for someone living "at the bleeding edge of web standards". Or maybe it looks Ok if you view it on a Mac?

That's the latest WordPress 'twentytwenty' theme I think.

Cool, that's the theme WordPress recommended to use as default in 2020? Maybe I should ask them to buy me a Hi-DPI monitor... that would display a bit more content, but actually I'm afraid the lonely column of text in the middle of the screen would look even worse.

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

#184
post #101
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…

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

HN doesn't have a "quotes" feature. Some users here have the unfortunate habit of abusing the code formatting feature for quotes.

>There is no way to have avatars or some other ways to distinguish users

Thank god. There's a lot I miss about forums, but avatars and huge signature blocks are better left in the trashbin of history.

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

#185
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a difficult one though - say I have left menu, and a sidebar on the right, and a central column with my copy. Very roughly, at about ~1350px (so neatly displayed on a generic 1440 laptop) I have about 250*2 (500px) for my sidebars, about 800px for my central column, which at a decent font size will give me a 'right-ish' about of words per line, and a few more pixels for gutters. As you start to make that smaller…

I see your point, and I'm not complaining about that. As you point out: > Maybe the search bar becomes an icon (...) I'd already be ecstatic about that. I'm talking about features which are essential to a website that just disappear completely because the owner thinks "no one on a tablet will ever want to use this".

Haha, yes, it's definitely a balancing act! Thankfully analytics and heatmaps are a good start to figuring this out (even without applying common sense fundamentals)!

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

#186
post #83

As with every engineering project, there's always a point where you have to look at how few people are within a certain use case and decide it's not worth the effort to cater for them As a vertical PC user, you're in the vast minority, and you can't really be surprised that people don't want to spend the extra time (and money) developing to support your edge case

His problem is not really the vertical screen, but that he is virtually scaling the monitor down to 720px wide.

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

#187
post #4

The proposed solution for developers doesn't work any better; DPI is correctly calculated on desktop, but nearly always wrong on phones. So fixing sites for vertical desktop monitors will break them in most phones.

I’d express it much more strongly than you have: doing what this article suggests is catastrophically wrong. For layout purposes you must not look at physical resolution. Physical resolution should only be used so that you can render on scaled displays at higher quality, e.g. by choosing a higher-resolution image, or by scaling your canvas by devicePixelRatio so you can draw more precise lines.

The proposed solution is not just no better, but far, far worse.

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

#188
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What tablet? Aren't we talking pretty much anything between about ~500px and ~1200px here? That's pretty much tablet zone...

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

#189
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 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.

How is a web site supposed to know if you're someone sitting in bed with the screen a few feet away, or someone sitting at a desk with a screen a few inches away?

That's on the user. Learn how to use your browser, device, and operating system's zoom features.

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