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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

#301

Post by StillBored »

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.

It does clamp text at some max width. If you have a couple 1440p monitors try stretching the browser window across screens.

Its actually one of those cases where the old news print model of multiple columns would work well, but that is much harder than it should be with CSS, so pretty much no one does newsprint style scrolling where you read all the columns and then scroll to the next set.

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

#302

Post by cosmodisk »

Many years ago, when I was a little kid in dark 90s,my dad was picking up some cargo from the country's largest dairy company at the time. So we end up walking through the narrow passages of the production line and eventually end up at the account sitting in front of her very modern PC with a vertical screen!It wasn't even tilted,it was made that way! I looked at it and it looked so impressive. It took many years for me to see again someone using a monitor like that.

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

#303

Post by kps »

teddyh wrote: post #162
oblio wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, now do bold ;-)

You mean 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀?

Now try a screen reader (on a mac, Edit > Speech > Start Speaking will do nicely).

Spoiler: You mean mathematical sans-serif bold small l, mathematical sans-serif bold small i, mathematical sans-serif bold small k, mathematical sans-serif bold small e, mathematical sans-serif bold small t, mathematical sans-serif bold small h, mathematical sans-serif bold small i, mathematical sans-serif bold small s?

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

#304

Post by contravariant »

cratermoon wrote: post #291
contravariant wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the OP is using pixels as a proxy for screen size as well, they're deliberately presenting their screen as 720x1080 to make the fonts bigger because they are too far from the screen. The stupidest thing to do at that stage would be to say "ah I see you're running a low resolution on a huge screen, let me make all the text tiny".

> they're deliberately presenting their screen as 720x1080 to make the fonts bigger because they are too far from the screen. As I read this I: 1. am wearing my computer reading glasses +1.5 2. have my browser set to zoom HN by 125% 3. am reading distance from the screen I know programming and tech in general is a young man's game, but let's at least try not to be ignorantly ageist & ableist.

I have no such intention, I was merely rephrasing what they said:

> But I find the fonts slightly too small at that resolution – given how far I sit from the screen.

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

#305

Post by Brian_K_White »

cratermoon wrote: post #291
contravariant wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the OP is using pixels as a proxy for screen size as well, they're deliberately presenting their screen as 720x1080 to make the fonts bigger because they are too far from the screen. The stupidest thing to do at that stage would be to say "ah I see you're running a low resolution on a huge screen, let me make all the text tiny".

> they're deliberately presenting their screen as 720x1080 to make the fonts bigger because they are too far from the screen. As I read this I: 1. am wearing my computer reading glasses +1.5 2. have my browser set to zoom HN by 125% 3. am reading distance from the screen I know programming and tech in general is a young man's game, but let's at least try not to be ignorantly ageist & ableist.

I think their point was that if you want fonts to be bigger, there are settings to do that. (or should be even if the world isn't perfect yet) Same to a lesser extent for other ui features.

In reality, as of today, so far, neither desktops nor apps are that good where you can have the display set at it's correct native resolution, while having buttons, menus, icons, text, window controls etc all scale to preference.

But saying that that's what should happen rather than lie to the software about the hardware, is not agist or ableist.

I think the point was simply that fundamentally, lying to the software about the hardware is always inherently doomed to produce some form of incorrect result, and when it does, it's not the tech's fault for failing to second-guess, work-around, and essentially thwart your actively dishonest misconfiguration.

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

#306

Post by Xevi »

rob74 wrote: 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?

Holy cr*p, that website consumes 30% CPU in Chrome for me. Scrolling lags like hell. Please revoke their web dev license.

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

#307

Post by Izkata »

jakub_g wrote: post #174
sillysaurusx wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FYI desktop Firefox has "Zoom Text Only" feature. View > Zoom > Zoom Text Only On mobile: all browsers have "force enable zoom" + test scaling in accessibility settings; Additionally Opera supports reflow on zoom (Settings > Text options > "Text wrap").

I like how it's now a "feature". This is what zoom originally did, and "full zoom" was the feature.

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

#308

Post by DangerousPie »

owlmirror wrote: post #209
reaperducer wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's something I don't understand. the Dev tools in Chrome and Firefox make it really easy to test through every resolution without problems. every UI change I make I view in all possible resolutions and its quite obvious of something breaks and I adjust accordingly.

The tooling isn't the problem, time is. Every device and resolution you support takes time and at some point you hit a point of diminishing returns.

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

#309

Post by hellotomyrars »

ortusdux wrote: post #103
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: http…

That's horrific. And the content is off center at full res so they can load their sidebar that well, isn't so much as off to the side as halfway into the center of the screen.

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

#310

Post by marvindanig »

This is an excellent post. I wrote about the new landscape of the web [1] a few weeks ago and how responsive web design is a complete failure in addressing that.

There are so many fallacies!

1. Tablet != mobile. 2. Mobile != Watch. 3. Desktops can be in portrait mode. 4. EV Cars like Tesla Model 3/S are closer to tablet than desktop.

[1] https://bubblin.io/blog/the-new-landscape-of-the-web

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