Goodbye and good riddance to the 16:9 aspect ratio
theverge.com
theverge.com
What I find really hilarious is how they sell laptops with a 16:9 screen with an OS that confiscates a wide strip at the bottom of the screen, a browser that confiscates a wide strip at the top of the screen, and then the web sites add their own massive strip of menus and crap at the top of the screen, and some cookie notice that you can't possibly agree to removes another generous strip from the bottom, so that the remaining aspect ratio for the actual content is about 9:1 and it's like peering through somebody's letterbox.
"Hullo, Mrs Jones, are you all right in there?"
I've been moving my taskbar to the side of the screen for years - it just makes so much more sense on a screen with almost twice the width as height.
Like a stopped clock ubuntu got this one right.
As for aspect ratios, just pick a universal one please, I don't care which I just don't want to listen to my uncle complain about the black bars at the top/bottom when he's watching a movie.
I don't really know the solution for taskbars and the like.
There's sidebars, taskbars, auto-hiding and popups.
I've seen them all done poorly.
I think the worst of all are microsoft products - somehow the online interface for microsoft word is completely different from teams, but they are both uniformly awful.
Strangely I know clearly the ones I hate, but it's hard to recall the ones that work well because they're invisible.
Taking reddit as an example they stack the title and the image above each other then all the links for comments, share, save ... below that. So the entire design is vertical for each post. More than that the trending is at the top and the selector for whether you want hot/new all above it. Even on 1440p I reckon about 40% of the top of my screen goes to tab/url/boomarks and the headers of the page, none of it I care about the moment I want to read that site.
Reddit puts a bit of secondary stuff on the right but nothing on the left of the content at all. The content is literally 25% of the width of the screen, its mostly grey space and yet they have this entirely vertical design for every post and all their controls are at the top. It isn't the only possible way to do this and its terrible for wide screens of any type. The old design utilises widescreens a heck of a lot better which is I presume why it is quite popular.
It is a design failure that the interface is not build to accomodate the typical screen that the interface is sold with.
This is like selling right handed scissors at a convention for left handed people or color coding a guide for colorblind people
To take your comparison, color blind people can enable accessibility options, but it's not enabled by default for everybody.
The only OS that actively disallows this is macOS... I couldn't figure out how to move menu bar on that test machine...
Just for my understanding, what would your ideal interface be?
There are a few programs that do this well. NLEs for video usually use horizontal space for the timeline and they get much better horizontal use than just about anything else I use. Photo editing software often puts toolbars on the side but even though inkscape does do this it still has a toolbar even with the tools and properties either side. But websites are mostly vertical and waste most of the space a lot of the time as are browsers. The OS wastes a bunch of vertical space where horizontal is available and the taskbar/app bar is about half of the problem.
menu bar:
- Ubuntu - use KDE or other WM - you have menu bar on the right if you want (or removed entirely)
- Windows - right click and configure as you wish.
- Mac OS - complain to Apple... I couldn't figure it out either... probably was holding it wrong as per Steve Jobs...
title bar:
- firefox / chrome have option to hide it entirely.
tab bar:
- firefox: first search, there are others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
As for other programs... it's up to them.
Where half of the screen is covered with ads, banners, and irrelevant auto-playing videos that you cannot scroll away from.
This doesn't really add up. When working with windows side by side, horizontal space is beneficial. And the tabs in the browser will also have more space on a wider aspect ratio. You can't have it both ways - on a wider screen, you'll have more space to put windows side by side and have a lot of tabs, on a tall screen you need to do less vertical scrolling within a window.
personally on a laptop i prefer 3:2 for most things but on a larger monitor i like 16:9 since you can have two programs side by side.
on a 16:9 smaller laptop screen, having things like two file browsers side by side works ok, but having programs with lots of ui, adobe premier or photoshop, not so much
I don't want the text wider but boy do most websites do a terrible job of utilising the space I actually have. Reality is reading on 16:9 is horrible, it is too wide, text is better on 9:16. Very wide paragraphs are hard to follow. For work purposes I would probably be better off turning the screens and you see that a bunch in offices.
16:9 however is substantially better for gaming and movies than 4:3 ever was. The super ultra wides are amazing for gaming as horizontal space is the most immersion impacting.
If i will ever use a laptop for work, it definitely won't be standalone - it will be connected to such a monitor. For on-the-go tasks - whatever really. Just remove the hideous bezels and screen logos already and simply copy what Dell is doing with its XPS line, gang beat them up if they sue.
Having that much vertical resolution is great especially when looking at documents and code, and I feel no need for a secondary screen.
I even temporarily went back to the dual FHD screen setup while in the office, and honestly it was like looking through a mailbox. Now when I see the dual screen setup with one in portrait mode, and one in landscape mode - it just looks to me like a poor solution to the problem of not having enough vertical AND horizontal resolution. For me, the square monitor solves it, but it may not be for everyone.
For those interested, the monitor in question is the Eizo FlexScan EV2730Q.
What I do mind is designers assuming that everyone has their browser maximised to a 16:9 sized window. There has been inordinate amounts of work done to make things responsive to mobile view, but then that appears to be thrown out the window when a desktop/laptop screen is detected.
But I get it, not for most people but then again my desktop is 21:9
https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
>16:9 screens are cramped
I think this depends on the screen size. Small screen, yes, because you mostly use apps full screen. Large screen, no because you can run side-by side
I have found with 2x 16:9 that a lot of interfaces really haven't caught up to the widescreen aspect yet and I imagine that is worse. 32:9 is going to be great for gaming however and that is largely where I think 16:9 is much better than 4:3 and why I used triple screens in the past.
This. All my screens are in portrait orientation. 9:16.
living the dream, my friend
Almost every single thing on a computer is meant to be scrolled, so 9:16 is natural for desktop UI, web pages, documents, code editing, the works. All 16:9 is good for is videos, and I have a second screen for whenever I watch those.
I tried that once [1], but it didn't work very well for me. The monitor was 1080p, and I had trouble with desktop UIs that assumed a minimum width of 1280 (so I'd occasionally get things like the OK button truncated). Also a lot of websites (including HN) kick into mobile mode when they notice a tall aspect ratio, which was also annoying.
[1] I got a 16:9 monitor at work (I'd ordered a 16:10, but IT did a substitution in their rube-goldberg purchasing process.
> All 16:9 is good for is videos, and I have a second screen for whenever I watch those.
Couldn't agree more.
I have been using a 4:3 ThinkPad T42 with a 1400x1050 display in my teenage years and I cannot be happier.
Tall screen are just better. I remember editing a document on that 1400x1050 display was a pleasure, whereas all my schoolmates were scrolling up and down because they couldn't fit a single page on their screen (at a reasonable font size).
Always makes me laugh to see people complain that some website has lots of empty space to the left and right of the text when they maximize it on their widescreen monitor. You're not supposed to maximize every window!
Also, windows more easily snap to monitors than to sides of a single monitor. I don't feel like micro-managing the sizes of my windows either.
AFAIK Dell has been selling 16:10 monitors all along. They cost a bit more (but they are a bit bigger, after all)
However, I did find this: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1202266-REG/canon_690...
Price might be a little prohibitive though...
It's a shame because I do miss my 16:10 Dell, but it's nothing compared to 4k
High DPI then, Mr Pedantic.
> Price might be a little prohibitive though...
ROFL. They can keep it.
If you don't like 16:9 for your home PC just rotate the monitor so you have a 9:16 instead. I find that way better for coding.
Most 16:10 screens add rows to a common 16:9 resolution. So 10:16 is even better than 9:16.
I never could really use two IDEs on 16:9 screen, with 21:9 this is not an issue. With a bit higher resolution and screen size, I get all the benefits of dual monitor screen with just one screen.