Tall and Narrow | Hacker News Reader

Tall and Narrow

tbray.org

20 pointsapress10 comments

I find this better explains use cases.

http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ipad-scroll-or-card/

Information Design: Card stacks create random breaks in the reading flow. The more breaks the more you need to reorient—in other words: Think.

One thing I've found is that in a scrolling interface, I tend to neurotically scroll constantly, keeping my actual reading visual field at the top few lines of the scrolling area. I.e., when I can scroll, I will, constantly.

Card-based, or paginated reading interfaces, on the other hand, allow me to relax because I know I don't have to page over until I hit the bottom of the current page. The constant (very) low-grade anxiety is gone.

Not that that's an overwhelming argument for pagination, but it's not a point I see addressed ever. I agree with most of the other points, e.g. lack of indication of length or place. But they seem pretty easily addressable.

There are compromises, too, like a scrolling interface with a page down mechanism, but I've found that they're not as satisfying as a horizontal pagination.

Part of this might be having grown up with physical media.

I do the same thing when using a mouse. Interestingly though, when using a touch interface for the same page, I tend to scroll less often. This includes when I'm using a touch pad for scrolling on a PC.

I disagree with the OP. When you're actually reading newspapers, books, and magazines, they're open and are wider than they are tall. All other media, TV, movies, etc are also wider than tall, and tablets are not about consuming totally static content.

Would folks please edit the titles to remove the blog name, author, and other meta-text leaving only the actual post title? There are some exceptions, of course, but I suggest that for a post like this, the title ought to be just "Tall and Narrow." Thanks for listening!

Please flag and/or remove this post if the request really doesn't belong in the discussion. Even if you agree with my request!

The content of the /html/head/title element is indeed what was entered as the posting title.

Yes it does, and HN suggests the title element as the default when submitting a link. However, most blogging products add extra stuff like the name of the blog for SEO purposes. If you look at the post itself, the title is simply "Tall and Narrow."

HN shows you the doman (tbray.org) next to the title, so there is no need to also have the title incude Tim's name or the name of his blog.

So my suggestion is to override the default, as we are not search engine bots. I contend this makes the titles easier to read and parse for humans. JM2C, of course.

The OP is ill informed.

Devices are meant to be landscape oriented because our field of vision is landscape oriented - and it feels natural to have most of your field of view occupied by what you're primarily engaged in.

This is the reason books are landscape oriented once opened, so are newspapers (broadsheets both when opened and folded, tabloids when unfolded)

Also our shoulders are about 1.5-2 feet apart - so portrait orientations are uncomfortable to hold.

Columnar rivers of text, when laid out correctly (without requiring a vertical scroll) on a landscape oriented tablet "feel" natural -- and is the right thing to do instead of filling empty spaces with attention stealing widgets.

Infact you can attempt similar multi-column layouts on the web, albeit with limited success, like on most of the apple.com site and the erstwhile International Herald Tribune iht.com site (before it got merged into the NYT site)

I say it depends. For 7 to 10" tablets, the author may well be correct.

I have a 5" Dell Streak which I almost always use in landscape, especially when reading PDFs as the display is sufficiently wide that I don't have to scroll horizontally.

You can hold a tablet in portrait alignment, and have a news/reader app that gave you multiple tall narrow columns of text.

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