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Comment by anamexis | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but of course the aspect ratio is important. If you unfold a square, you don't get two squares.

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I think the person you are responding to is not thinking visually. They basically seem (to me) to think reformat-flowed fixes this, and that having the view of a web page alter because you open a book, is "not a bad thing" when you (and I) are of the view, if you maintain the aspect ratio and simply decimate how many pixels are available to show it, the actual "change" in the layout is kept to a minimum WHICH IS THE INHERENT GOOD HERE -the whole point of the A, B and C series is that the scaling function preserves the ratio of sizes of the contents, under the quality change of bigger or smaller fidelity of presentation.

Unless there is some upsight I am missing, I think the OP just "doesn't get it"

The upsight is that they are responding to a point about side by side apps, not a single full screen app on the unfolded screen

I don't think this is a killer logic either. If you consider that the apps were both running, both full screen on the folded state and alternate which is in view, and now can come into view side by side when you open, surely the "good" is that nothing positional in the layout or styling changes, when you move from swipe-and-select to side-by-side.

>If you unfold a square, you don't get two squares.

yes, you do. Two squares will fold together into the space of one square, and the same with 2 A4 sheets of paper, or two 8½x11 sheets of paper, two of them will fold together to make one of them.

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say, or what would refute what I said.

You said: "If you unfold a square, you don't get two squares."

In the context of this discussion, it is reasonable to assume that any "square" available to be unfolded is something approximately like the folding phone, consisting of two layers joined by a hinge. When you unfold that, you go from having a square to having a rectangle equivalent to two adjacent squares, and usable as two adjacent squares.

I see. I agree (obviously, it's a fact), but in the context of this discussion about aspect ratios and why the golden ratio would be relevant to this situation, it is reasonable to assume that the point here is that a full-screen, unfolded image would scale exactly to a half-screen/folded image with no change in aspect ratio.

>it is reasonable to assume that the point here is that a full-screen

wrong. you answered under the context of yunwal's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49630931#49634166

  > None of that matters for a phone.
  Of course it does. They show the most basic example right 
  on the page, which is that you can side-by-side full screen 
  apps.

which is talking about the case of two separate apps running side-by-side (unfolded), as was shown in one of the pictures of the device.

Right, which is under the context of hbarka’s comment

> The iPhone Duo is designed with this in mind. The aspect ratio any way you view it, folded or open, is preserved. Apple design knows a thing or two.

which is talking about the aspect ratio being preserved in the open and folded/half modes.

that's not how threading works

there were plenty of other threads under that comment in that direction

> it is reasonable to assume that the point here is that a full-screen, unfolded image would scale exactly to a half-screen/folded image with no change in aspect ratio.

Sure, but aside from being interesting from a mathematical standpoint, there are no practical implications from that fact. When the user unfolds the phone and rotates it by 90 degrees, the fact that they're left with about the same aspect ratio (modulo whatever changes with status bars, etc.) means very little for UI design in light of the much more important fact that the screen doubled in size and thus the application's layout should be using the extra screen space to show more information, and should not assume that a majority of the screen is easily reachable by a thumb.

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