Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Widescreen laptops are dumb

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 173 posts

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#121

Post by exergy »

UncleEntity wrote: post #63
madmulita wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the header has something in it, the white margins are completely useless but eat a lot of real state.

Yes, the ability to "tweet" and "share". Neither of which I ever do so it's just a bunch of wasted space. My favorite is the headers that mess up scrolling with the space key -- scroll down then immediately scroll up because the header is covering part of the content. And don't even get me started on sites (looking at you Medium) that have both headers and footers...

ublock's "content rule" feature gets a lot of use out of me for this exact reason.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#122

Post by pmarreck »

chisleu wrote: post #51
cup-of-tea wrote: post #31

I don't know why this article is only about laptops. It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too. I've been complaining about it for years. Widescreen is a terrible shape for code. I don't need more horizontal space, I need more lines. What am I going to use horizontal space for? People say turn the monitor vertical but that's horrible too. The screen is designed to be viewed at a certain angle for…

Everyone on the teams at my last 3 jobs has preferred a single large 4k display to alternatives. The ability to have 3-4 columns of code, as well as more lines of code per column, has been invaluable for productivity. It is very often that I find myself debugging or reading code for the first time and need to dive into several layers of code. Having it all side by side helps tremendously. YMMV

I now prefer UWQHD to my 4k monitor. It's like having two screens side by side without a seam.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#123

Post by regularfry »

lamename wrote: post #48

Screens are visual, and human vision is biased to search lateral space over vertical space. This is due to the nature of humans' visuospatial limitations. We're largely 2d animals in our movement: front/back & left/right, not so much up down. This is different from animals like birds and fish who constantly have to navigate all 3 dimensions to catch prey and avoid death. We aren't ignorant of vertical space, but hori…

I thought it was because panel manufacturers could make them cheaper if they used the same components for monitors and TVs.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#124

Post by octorian »

chisleu wrote: post #51
cup-of-tea wrote: post #31

I don't know why this article is only about laptops. It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too. I've been complaining about it for years. Widescreen is a terrible shape for code. I don't need more horizontal space, I need more lines. What am I going to use horizontal space for? People say turn the monitor vertical but that's horrible too. The screen is designed to be viewed at a certain angle for…

Everyone on the teams at my last 3 jobs has preferred a single large 4k display to alternatives. The ability to have 3-4 columns of code, as well as more lines of code per column, has been invaluable for productivity. It is very often that I find myself debugging or reading code for the first time and need to dive into several layers of code. Having it all side by side helps tremendously. YMMV

Around my office, we have two common setups. A large 30" display (16:10), or a super-wide curved display.

The super-wide is way too short, vertically, that I have no interest in using one.

I actually have two of those 30" displays on my desk. My approach is do to most of my work on the primary, and to shove some chat windows, log windows, etc, to the secondary. So I'm really using all of one display, and maybe half of the other. (Of course once displays get this big, the other half of the secondary display is too far from my field of view anyways.)

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#125

Post by rsync »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #31

I don't know why this article is only about laptops. It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too. I've been complaining about it for years. Widescreen is a terrible shape for code. I don't need more horizontal space, I need more lines. What am I going to use horizontal space for? People say turn the monitor vertical but that's horrible too. The screen is designed to be viewed at a certain angle for…

"It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too."

Actually, it's quite simple - here is a 27" 1920x1920 square monitor you can buy on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/FlexScan-EV2730QFX-Monitor-1920x1920-...

I have one and I think it's great. I actually prefer splitting a 16x10 monitor into two halves, but the perfectly square monitor is great for diagnostics/monitoring where I can split it into four equally sized quadrants and see four things at once...

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#126

Post by octorian »

derekp7 wrote: post #49
cup-of-tea wrote: post #31

I don't know why this article is only about laptops. It's difficult to buy a square desktop monitor these days too. I've been complaining about it for years. Widescreen is a terrible shape for code. I don't need more horizontal space, I need more lines. What am I going to use horizontal space for? People say turn the monitor vertical but that's horrible too. The screen is designed to be viewed at a certain angle for…

The trade-off is that now we have more vertical pixels than ever before (4k monitors). It just comes with extra bonus pixels on the sides too. What I do is have a code window on one side, and a documentation window on the other.

Yeah, now. Thanks to Apple's start of the high DPI push and 4k/5k displays.

For a long time, we suffered from what I'll call "The Great Laptop Display Regression of 2008". For many years, you simply could NOT buy a non-Apple laptop with more than 1080 pixels in the vertical direction. It didn't matter how big of a screen you got, and it didn't matter how much you were willing to pay for it. No one dared even give you the option.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#127

Post by WorldMaker »

ropeadopepope wrote: post #115
Zak wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When reading text, I believe the opposite to be true. It's why newspapers use relatively narrow columns of text despite having a lot of width to work with. It's much easier to keep my place and process information if I don't have to move my eyes much horizontally. When it comes to scanning for unexpected information, you may be right. A high aspect ratio might be better suited for gaming, at least with games where a…

The problem with both yours and the parent's assertion is context. Newspapers are easy to move so the portion you're reading is in your field of view. Your monitor isn't and it's used for much more than just reading static text. 1.5:1 may be a good reading aspect ratio, but if you need multiple things with that aspect ratio open and on the screen at the same time then you need a wider screen. edit: I just realized a…

I wish more websites used it as a design choice instead of margins/padding. CSS actually has reasonably good support for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Columns...

(Though best supported by Firefox and Edge, with interesting bugs in Chrome and Safari I've seen.)

With one major flaw in that -ms-scroll-translation still hasn't made it out of being just an IE 10 suggestion (that Edge still supports and no one else) and into the specs and is a pain to polyfill, but a relatively key ergonomic need: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh973361(v=vs.85).a...

Windows 8 tried to encourage horizontal scrolling, multi-column design in applications and websites, so Microsoft put some good work into the ergonomics of it, and I appreciated they tried and am still somewhat sad they failed.

(I'm proud that my blog uses a multi-column layout for text at wide widths, but given it is my blog I can do weird design craziness like that that amuses/interests me and not worry about confusing potential visitors.)

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#128

Post by octorian »

slantyyz wrote: post #93
cup-of-tea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not more space. My 4:3 monitor has a resolution of 1600x1200. That's 180 lines of pixels more than a 1080p screen which is about 13 lines of text.

>> It's not more space. My 4:3 monitor has a resolution of 1600x1200. That's 180 lines of pixels more than a 1080p screen which is about 13 lines of text. And it's 320 less lines horizontally. What matters to you may not matter to the next person, because their use case is different from yours. No matter what laptop (and monitor) manufacturers do with respect to aspect ratio, they're never going to please everyone wi…

Which is why we started by widening that to 1920x1200 (16:10). Which I think many of us were perfectly happy with. You didn't lose any vertical pixels, but gained horizontal pixels.

Then all PC laptop manufacturers seemingly conspired to deny us the option to purchase anything, at any price point, with >1080 vertical pixels. (Thankfully Apple didn't follow this trend at the time.)

Of course now with all the 4k/5k/high-DPI stuff we might finally be moving past that, but I haven't gone PC laptop shopping in a long time.

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#129

Post by ghostly_s »

nailer wrote: post #41
cup-of-tea wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not more space. My 4:3 monitor has a resolution of 1600x1200. That's 180 lines of pixels more than a 1080p screen which is about 13 lines of text.

Those are oddly low resolutions for 2018, but: if it's the same height, just wider, then great. Also The Verge seems to think everyone uses maximised windows all the time, which is very 'The Verge' of them.

> Those are oddly low resolutions for 2018, but: if it's the same height, just wider, then great.

Not odd at all. '1080p' is probably the most common resolution on laptops sold today. They really fleeced us with the 'HD' marketing; laptop displays today are often lower res than they were ten years ago!

Re: Widescreen laptops are dumb

#130

Post by WorldMaker »

strmpnk wrote: post #3
dboreham wrote: post #2

Pro tip: put the toolbar on the left side of the screen rather than the the bottom location.

That doesn’t work well for toolbars which have text labels ( like bookmarks or a windows style taskbar).

Windows 95-style taskbar, sure, but since Vista switched to the default of grouping icons with rich hover, the Windows taskbar has only gotten better at being on the short axis.

(Though I've been keeping my main taskbar on the right hand side since XP and that was perfectly reasonable then even. These days, I tend to sandwich my Windows taskbars these days with it on the left on the left monitor and on the right on the right monitor.)

Post reply on HN