Hacker News Reader

Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever someone posts one of those "How to you like my app" posts, and I have to scroll horizontally, I mention it. And I usually get shouted down. They tell me to "graduate" from 800 x 600.

My argument has never been that any resolution is any better than any other. It's been that your app should work no matter what resolution your visitor arrives at.

This article is one excellent solution to that problem.

View on HN

Ehh. Here are all of the following "shoulds" that I hear:

- Your app should work at any resolution - Your app should work on any browser - Your app should work on any platform, even grandma's old PII running Windows 98 - Your app should work on dialup, and be sexy for broadband - Your app should be accessible to the blind - Your app should not break when new browser versions are released

...and so on and so forth.

I am perfectly willing to write such a beast. Are you perfectly willing to pay for the hundreds of hours it would take to do it?

Every app designer is unfortunately forced to make some tradeoffs. In some cases, they make many tradeoffs, usually because nobody's willing to pay them to meet the needs of every user out there.

Not coding for 800x600 in these days of high resolution, high-bandwidth design, is a logical tradeoff.

Not coding for 800x600 in these days of high resolution, high-bandwidth design, is a logical tradeoff.

For whom? You? Or your client/employer?

There are millions of people, credit card in hand, who will just click somewhere else if they have too much trouble with your page.

My clients don't want to leave a single penny on the table. They're the ones who determine the tradeoff, not me.

For what it's worth, in this completely unscientific survey, much less than 1% of all visitors to my site use 800x600. There are 15 more popular resolutions ahead of it. In fact, twice as many people show up on a mobile device with 396x320 resolution (aka iPhone).

The counter-argument to liquid-layouts is the fact that you need to specify a min-width which is not supported in all browsers (easy fix for jscript sure, but certainly not hack-free).

So for individuals like myself, who run at 1920x1200, legibility is a significant issue unless I manually resize my browser window which is about as much of a pain in the ass as scrolling horizontally.

Sadly, there is no perfect solution when designing for the web. Horses for courses.

At that resolution, you'd be somewhat insane to maximize your browser window. You should be using software that divides your screen into regions.

In OSX, the layering nature of windows to make drag-n-drop more usable sometimes becomes counter-productive.

There are times when I find I just want to focus on a single item and block everything else out, which forces me to either maximize Safari, or close down all my applications.

I don't care for Spaces too much right now, it's kind of buggy with Photoshop/Illustrator.

If you haven't already, you might want to give Think a try. It runs on OS X and might be exactly what you're looking for.

http://freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7013

I'm a fan of the multi-monitor model. Two 20" LCDs are often cheaper than one 40" (not the same area, I know) and can be much more useful. My typical setups are:

screen one: rotated vertical with code

screen two: horizontal with command line and the app splitting horizontal real estate.

--------------------------

screen one: full-sized game

screen two: web browser and IM client

> min-width which is not supported in all browsers

There's a very simple workaround. Reference a transparent, one pixel image and specify the desired minimum width.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com