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The End of Non-Widescreen Laptops?
Santi Onta writes "Today Lenovo retired the last NON-widescreen laptop they offered (the T61 14.1) from the market, and Lenovo is just an example (Apple, Sony, HP, etc. are the same). I understand the motivation behind all the laptop manufacturers to move to widescreen: they can still advertise that they offer 14.1 or 15.4 screens, but the screen area is smaller, and thus they save more money. Some people might like widescreens (they are useful for some tasks), but any developer knows that vertical space matters! Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity. How can laptop manufacturers still claim that they look after their customers when the move to widescreens is clearly a selfish one? I just wish they offered non-widescreen laptops, even if it were for a plus (that I'd be more than happy to pay)." I've always preferred the widescreen aspect ratio -- vertical matters, but having two nice wide columns always mattered more to me. Until this reader's submission, I hadn't realized that it was such a contested issue. Does this matter?
I find widescreen is actually much better for development. I'm mainly programming in Netbeans or Eclipse and having the navigator on one side and the 'outline' on the right is great. On a standard aspect monitor, this leaves the central portion for working on code really small. On widescreen (I use a 20" widescreen) this central code portion is much bigger. It's much the same in Visual Studio.
Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something, I could agree. Even then though, do I really need 100 lines on the screen at once?
I'd much rather have half the lines on the screen and be able to use the extra features of my IDE to aid in navigation and keep my concentration focused on the area that I'm working in.
One thing to consider in this is the keyboard. As laptop manufacturers make their laptops smaller and smaller they are almost required to use widescreens in order to keep the device wide enough to have a useable keyboard.
is nice, beacuse all the media player apps I use from bed fit their controls into the bottom & top 5% of the screen
media player, VLC, winamp, the dvd software I use... the bars fit perfectly, I can leave them live and watch 16:9 content
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Just a thought here, but have you ever considered... oh, I dunno... changing the resolution of your laptops video out to, perhaps, a "standard" ratio such as 1024x768?
I know, I know, this is just as "extreme" as actually connecting the laptop to the projector in the first place, but really, despite the monumentous stretch of technical wizardry it requires to to actually find and then change the resolution settings to something more appropriate for a projector, it does work wonders for solving that whole distortion problem. Cheers!
This signature is lame.
I don't know if this is a factor in the move to wide screens or not, but supposedly the golden rectangle is the most visually pleasing rectangle. It has an aspect ratio of 1.618.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Vertical space does matter to developers. People even today walk by my desk and laugh at my twisted widescreen HP monitor. They can't possibly see the benefit. Then I drag over a pdf file of a specification document and can read a whole 8.5x11 sheet on that screen while coding on the other screen and they instantly see how well this size matches up.
Plus I am coding in C at work. Sequential code tends to have longer functions and thus you need more vertical space to see the whole thing.
A widescreen laptop is a joke. Laptop screens are too small to begin with. Sure, I like diff on a wide screen. But the majority of my work is not diff. Since a laptop screen does not rotate, I prefer the standard setup. It simply does not fit with the proportions I am used to looking at all day, which is a sheet of paper.
And watching a HD movie on my 15" laptop!?! Haha, what's the point? I'd rather watch it on something designed and comfortable for movie/TV watching.
One of my pet peeves about windows is that they layer the tool bars horizontally by default. They even use a menu bar per window.
then they put the widow dock along the bottom along with all sorts of crap. this chews up vertical real estate.
Most of the most poliched linux window managers make the same mistake. It's almost like you have to have virtual windows simply because they mismanage the screen realestate.
DSL linux's default window manager is a notable exception, and is very parsimonious about its use of screen area, presumably because it expected to be used on small screens of older machines.
Apple is better about saving screen real estate, since all windows share a single thin menu bar and the doc can be moved to vertical. Traditionally they use smaller icons and fewer of them so their toolbars usually are single width and thin (some notable exceptions however, like preview.app) Apple even puts the equivalent of tabs on the side of widows rather than the bottom (i.e. the window managers offer sidebars typically).
So perhaps it is not a surprise that apple was an early adopter of widescreen.
In my personal habits, I prefer widescreen because I feel like I can juggle more windows than with a vertical screen. But I get enraged when windows have all sorts of menu crap and tool bars that gobble my vertical screen realestate.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Also a lot of tablet PCs (the X61t as well as many others) still come in a 4:3 aspect ratio, since that closely matches 8.5" by 11", which makes sense since a tablet is often for either viewing or writing something the standard size of a piece of paper.
Viewing an entire 8.5" by 11" document on a widescreen monitor doesn't work, unless its a 20"+ screen and you view the document in portrait orientation on 1/2 of the screen. I don't think 4:3 screens are going to disappear.
If you add "127.0.0.1 rds.yahoo.com" into your hosts file to stop these miscreants from potentially screwing with your computer if you accidentally click on an rds.yahoo.com link, will it have any detremental effect to using any of Yahoo's other services?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Why are you maximizing your browser? I have my Pidgin buddy list on the upper right, a terminal (partly covered by the browser) on the lower right, the browser taking up about 2/3 of the screen dead center, and my desktop icons are visible on the left.
If I open another window (say a PDF reader or OO.org) it goes to the left of the browser, just wider than a page, so that it overlaps the browser somewhat.
This idea that browsers should be maximized is a disease. Do your part to eradicate it.
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