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The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

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Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#71

Post by shrughes »

jowiar wrote: post #33
Lagged2Death wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the old-school CRT monitors were much narrower even than 3:2 (1.5) - they were 4:3 (1.33), just like NTSC television, and very close to the very-old-school "Academy Ratio" in the movies. Which is the reason the movie business invented wide-screen: To make their movies darn near unwatchable on standard television. HDTV went wide-screen to chase the movie business, which has in response pursued ever more extre…

Eh, wide ratios aren't a new creation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Hur_(1959_film)

That's around when Hollywood's widescreen response to television happened.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#72

Post by snotrockets »

lenazegher wrote: post #23
shoopy wrote: post #9

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I talk about aspect ratios with average consumers. Most people really do believe--probably through HDTV marketing--that wider screens are better. The lion's share of most people's time on the Internet is spent reading and scolling vertically, yet our devices are optimized for watching little sixty second movie clips at a time. Why wouldn't you want to make the 95% case more ple…

The author dismisses the possibility of side-by-side windows on a small screen, but I no problems using multiple windows on my 1080p 15" laptop screen. Therefore i find a wider screen much more productive--it's much harder to intelligently fill a screen with a narrower aspect ratio

(author here) I find a 15" laptop to big to be useable as a laptop. My current one has a 13.3", and that's not enough to open two side-by-side documents showing 80 chars per line each, without having the fonts ridiculously small. remember that font size should be the same regardless the dpi, so having more pixels won't help if the physical size remain the same.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#73

Post by antiterra »

This blog entry presents a single argument: aspect ratios should favor a more narrow width because they should aspire to the readability of a page.

That's a single bullet point in a long pro/con list and you'll never reach consensus on the definitively correct aspect ratio. Plenty of people watch movies on their computer screens, others like having an IDE with frames on the side, others want games to spread across their horizontal field of view and some just think it looks modern. Why on earth does that make the screen ratio 'boneheaded?'

Be excited for your preference, argue the use cases that it suits, that's all fine. Maybe toss the prescriptive attitude that your opinion is categorically correct for everyone else who has not yet discovered it.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#74

Post by rodh257 »

jfim wrote: post #24
NateDad wrote: post #4

Absolutely. I hated when everyone started making 16:9 monitors. The 16:10 ones weren't quite as bad, but seriously, give me some vertical pixels. Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible.

Get a monitor stand that swivels, so you can use the 16:9 ratio to your advantage. The only catch is that you start noticing when people write long lines over 120 chars, though they shouldn't do that in the first place. Edit: It's also really awesome for reading/editing documents, since you can fit the full page onscreen.

I do this, however I feel my 16:9 monitor is just a touch too thin, whereas 16:10 gives a perfect width.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#75

Post by snotrockets »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #51
pedalpete wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd disagree with that based on the stereotype of windows users not caring about UI or not noticing the lack of things like smooth animations and awkward sizing. I say that as a windows user and fan (I have a mac, but it's far from my favorite machine). I also don't feel that mac is any better at managing two windows than Windows. Microsoft has tried to improve the side-by-side window set-up with their hot spots, but…

I cant use an OS without the Window snap functionality of Windows 7/8. Just throw the windows into opposite corners and go. Every time I show people that feature I get a positive reaction but I guess I really have no idea how much they use it.

I suggest you try a tiling window manager, that automates the process.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#76

Post by xnxn »

nsp wrote: post #61
raldi wrote: post #52

The Pixel's best feature is the touchscreen. The first time you tap a tiny onscreen link with your finger, instead of trying to aim for it with the trackpad, or the first time you pinch to zoom out on Google Maps, you'll never want to use a non-touchscreen laptop again.

My understanding (source: most recent verge podcast) was that the touch screen doesn't support pinch to zoom - is that incorrect? I'd love to be wrong

It does, according to the product page.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixe...

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#77

Post by snotrockets »

taligent wrote: post #25
NateDad wrote: post #4

Absolutely. I hated when everyone started making 16:9 monitors. The 16:10 ones weren't quite as bad, but seriously, give me some vertical pixels. Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible.

> Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible. Have to disagree here. For Java and iOS development widescreen is far better because it allows project tree on the left, code in the middle and outline/inspector on the right.

I wrote more Java than I'd like to admit, all without an outline window: my setup for the last ~7 years is two emacs windows (emacs calls windows what the rest of the world call panes. it is strange like that) side by side.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#78

Post by petsos »

pedalpete wrote: post #42
petsos wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are windows users that are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.

I'd disagree with that based on the stereotype of windows users not caring about UI or not noticing the lack of things like smooth animations and awkward sizing. I say that as a windows user and fan (I have a mac, but it's far from my favorite machine). I also don't feel that mac is any better at managing two windows than Windows. Microsoft has tried to improve the side-by-side window set-up with their hot spots, but…

I didn't mean to say that all windows users do this, or that users of other OSes don't do that, but based on my experience most of the people who work with just one maximized window are windows users.

I don't want to start an OS flamewar though, so I'm going to restate my guess as:

I'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are people who are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#79

Post by ynniv »

beagle3 wrote: post #37
taligent wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason wider screens are preferred is because of human's field of view. We see 180 degrees horizontally yet only 135 degrees vertically. So why on earth would you build a screen that requires people to expend more energy to use ?

If that were true, people would have Preferred landscape books to portrait books. They don't.

When you open the book the two page spread is often landscape.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#80

Post by petsos »

snotrockets wrote: post #72
lenazegher wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author dismisses the possibility of side-by-side windows on a small screen, but I no problems using multiple windows on my 1080p 15" laptop screen. Therefore i find a wider screen much more productive--it's much harder to intelligently fill a screen with a narrower aspect ratio

(author here) I find a 15" laptop to big to be useable as a laptop. My current one has a 13.3", and that's not enough to open two side-by-side documents showing 80 chars per line each, without having the fonts ridiculously small. remember that font size should be the same regardless the dpi, so having more pixels won't help if the physical size remain the same.

I think you are missing the point of using multiple windows. You don't need to have N number of symmetrical windows all the time. You can have e.g. a small IM window on the side and a twitter client underneath, a terminal at the bottom, etc.

Personally I even like partially overlapping windows, e.g. I can only have part of a terminal visible if I'm tailing a file, I just need to see if something comes and then I can bring it on the front.

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