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The Case For Flipping Your Monitor From Landscape to Portrait
Molly McHugh writes The vast majority of computer-related tasks see no benefit from a screen that is longer than it is tall. Sure, video playback and gaming are some key exceptions, but if you watch Netflix on your TV instead of your computer monitor and you're not into PC gaming, that long, wide display is doing nothing but hampering your experience. Let's flip it. No, seriously. Let's flip it sideways.
I have two monitors: one landscape, one next to it flipped into portrait mode. It's not fucking rocket science.
I manage Unix systems so having it be wide screen helps with longer lines.
But I also write code so having a portrait screen helps when I'm reading documentation (PDFs for example).
So I have a four monitor setup. Two Landscape (one reversed above my number 1 landscape monitor) and Two Portrait; one to the left and one to the right of the two center monitors. Works well for web browsing and coding where I want more side to side screen space and gaming and works well when coding and I need directories to the left and pdfs to the right. The top screen has my debugger or Firebug if I'm working on a web page.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
The examples show lots of web sites in a maximized browser window. I use my widescreen monitor in landscape mode so I can have multiple windows simultaneously visible side-by-side. The examples are doing it poorly!
My old ViewSonic VP171s has built-in rotation and I've had it for a long time.
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Water is wet. Film at 11.
But both of my desktop monitors are locked into landscape. Now what I'd *really* like to see is a portrait (or a flippable) LAPTOP monitor...
Some monitors are make to be viewed landscape, and when rotated have horrible view angles.
I found some at work where the view angle was so bad, only one eye would get a good picture, while the other eye showed a faded & discolored image. Rubber-necking around would find a small sweet spot for viewing.
TLDR; doesn't work well on some monitors.
Computer monitors nowadays are just Hi-def TV screens. I had better monitor resolutions in the 90s than I do today.
what you really need is two vertical monitors side by side, so you can see two pages at once. you can simulate this using a single monitor in landscape mode, with two windows each occupying half the screen.
I had one of those samsung monitors in early 2008 that could rotate like that.
Yeah, its nice.
However, I prefer my setup the way it is for gaming.
Molly, respectfully, fu-k off
Portrait monitors were all the rage back in the 90's. All the desktop publishing people used them for working with Aldus Pagemaker.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I've been using one of my three monitors in portrait mode for decades. It was more important when you couldn't fit a full page of text in landscape orientation. It's also quite helpful to conserve desk real-estate.
Monitors, and scopes, were 4x3 because TVs were 4x3. 1970s word-processing systems like Wang and Dialogic used CRTs portrait-mounted. Rotating monitors have been around for years, especially since LCD displays are so much easier to reorient than big heavy CRTs. This is not news.
A single 30" 3840x2160 gets the job done in my home office just as well as 1 portrait + 2 landscape monitors (all 1280x1024 5:4) do in my cubicle...
I find it ironic that TFA has a layout more suited to horizontal monitors. With my (primary /. viewing) vertical monitor, most of the screen real-estate is taken up by the vast margins on the left and right for the stupid side widgets.
I've not been using my monitor wrong, you've been designing your websites all wrong...
I can't flip my laptop... My cell phone flips back and forth easily... but your web pages doesn't accommodate the reality of how screens are orientated... seems like some one pushing their problem down to the consumers rather than fixing it.
So if we ignore many different and popular reasons to use a computer then portrait comes out on top.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's like being in New York.
To summarize the article...
Widescreen good:
- Watching videos
- Gaming
Widescreen bad:
- Browsing the web
So is tall screen good for anything else?
Also, I find my laptop quite hard to use when the screen is vertical!
Yeah, I work in console mode... reading wrapped log file lines is bad, mkay?
meh
For viewing images or watching movies or playing games landscape view works best. For most all other cases, reading documents, coding, surfing the web, portrait view is better. Think about the flow when you are reading, isn't it natural that you want to see more rather than scrolling up and down?
you're right, its rocket surgery...
I've always thought that it's great to have an extra monitor be portrait. But I'm just too old school to commit my primary monitor to it (also I deal with a lot of tables/spread sheets of many columns. I'd prefer to see an entire entry than a few columns of many entires. But in the end it's all on what you do and how you do it.
This article is preaching to the choir. This is Slashdot. Anytime there's an article relating to monitors people complain about not being able to buy 4:3 anymore. I even built my own laptop just to be able to put a 4:3 screen in it.
The problem with rotating most widescreens is that now you have too little horizontal space. We want to be able to place two documents side by side and not have the title bars take up 33% of the vertical screen space. I want to have a reference document open and be able to see more than 5 lines in my email client's email bodies.
...for every other use than word processing and internet browsing, landscape is better!
Spreadsheets, slides, photo manipulation, graphic design, games are all easier/better in landscape mode.
For either orientation the more traditional aspect ratios are much better than the new wide screens.
with 4k monitors you're going to have alot of vertical pixels. so you could just buy a big 4k monitor and just have a tall window for your text-heavy applications. one big 4k monitor is going to have functionality similar to having multiple "HD" (1920x1080) monitors.
but 4k monitors aren't ready yet..may take a year or two. in the mean time I have an asus PA248 which gives a bit more veritical space (1920x1200). i can flip it but it becomes too tall (physically) for normal desktop use. i also have a flipped "HD" monitor and alot of times it's not wide enough for some websites.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
Stop using shitty windowing systems that expect you to maximize all your windows, and just put two (or more) windows side by side...
So because web designers fail to properly design the web and thus leave me with ridiculously narrow columns, I should rotate my monitor? That's rubbish. Scientific research has shown again and again that we can read longer lines much more efficiently than we can read short lines, even though our subjective experience is often to the contrary. Just fix those websites and keep your monitor in landscape. Thank you.
0x or or snor perron?!
Mac users figured out a long time ago that you could flip the monitor.
1) Two windows side by side, each taking half a screen?
2) Great, now where are all my panels going to go in Eclipse, Lightroom, Photoshop, etc? At the bottom? No thanks
3) Shifting your eyes side to side is more natural. Having to look further up and down is more strain.
4) If I turn my 1080p monitor vertically, my horizontal resolution will only be 1080 pixel. The vast majority of users are already running in a resolution with a wider width. How am I going to test my websites to see them the way most users will?
You don't have to run your fucking browser maximized. You can run windows side by side!!!
The phrase "you're doing it wrong" is obnoxious and used by people who have a strong opinion on something and believe that for some reason everyone should adopt their own preferences even though it has no impact on them whatsoever other than making them feel they have accomplished something in their miserable lives.
A decent wide screen monitor has large work place for main activity and a band on the side perfect for windows containing reference material, or make it more 50/50 split if references are heavy.
I used to think that vertical was better, but I've found I've just adapted my usage habits. Now I just use the horizontal layout to tile content side by side. Sometimes when coding I'll have two views of the same file side by side. On one I'll be coding, and I'll use the other view to scroll and jump around for context. Now that I've gotten used to this, I couldn't imagine using vertical, but I'm sure I'd also adapt and get used to it. I've also heard that the human visual system (including neck motion) is adapted for horizontal field of view. I.e. Stuff our ancestors needed to worry about (food, predators) would typically come from somewhere along the horizon (L-R) but not necessary above and below. Don't have reference. Sorry.
I started to flip my CRT TV when playing Ikaruga on Dreamcast.
It stayed in that position ever since...
Okay, I've managed to get the monitor off my laptop (it must have been stuck; I had to pry it off). Can someone tell me how to re-attach it as portrait?
The examples shown are mostly for browsing web pages in maximized windows. If that's your primary use case, you could probably get away with using this configuration, or even a tablet. But if you want to use multiple overlapping windows to do things such as side-by-side comparisons, then widescreen is definitely the way to go. But for me, this is a moot point. I try to keep my eyes fixed on a particular spot on the screen and use the scrollwheel to move the content to my focal point. A more useful feature would be having content organized in columns similar to newspapers and magazines since they are easier to read. If that was the case, then you would definitely have a stronger reason for using your monitor in portrait mode.
FLIP IT REAL GOOD!
They want their portrait-mode monitors back.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Stop making everything 12 pixels wide.
I use two 24" 1920x1200 screens in portrait mode side by side. That gets me 1900x2400 viewable with a vertical bar down the center. They are IPS panels so the viewing angle is fine in that orientation.
Putting the two monitors side-by-side in landscape or mixed was not going to happen at my desk so this was just sort of a happy discovery. With the nearly square aspect, it fits into the corner where the old CRT used to put it's backside and I still get lots-o-dots to look at.
I usually end up working with 4 windows tiled equally across the two panels, or a document maximized on one side while working on the other.
I spent entirely too much time scaling and cropping an antique world map with the side-by-side globes to perfectly span the two screens with the fold lost in the vertical bar. If nothing else it is a real attention-getter.
Has no one heard of viewing more than one thing at a time on a screen? How about putting two half-width windows next to each other? No need to flip anything.
Engineering firm here: I don't see any advantage this would give me when viewing CAD drawings or our typical spreadsheets. We all have multiple monitors as well so it's common for the desktop to be spanned across them as well.
There are several thousand at the office of various makes and models. Only a handful of them are even capable of rotating to portrait mode. The article makes it sound like everyone has the capability and chooses not to.
Lots of websites limit their width to, say, 1024 pixels. Other websites, like this one, extend across the entire page, but don't wrap text which makes them hard to read.
I wish more websites would allow their contents to wrap into two or more columns, like magazines do. Here, for instance, is a user style to wrap Slashdot comments into two columns.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
...with only a few extra vertical lines over ancient 1280x1024 panels, and not greatly superior 4:3 CRTs capable of doing 1280x960. But, good luck finding good deals on monitors that aren't 1920x1080 or some smaller widescreen resolution. At the place I used to work, it got to the point where I needed to view so much information (server monitoring at a webhost) at one time that even dual widescreen monitors were not an efficient solution in landscape orientation. So I brought my own monitor stands (Dell laptop docking station bases, actually, with rotating VESA plate) and some thumbscrews almost every day for a considerable length of time, and even had management approval to do so. People thought it was weird, but being able to see several hundred lines of text at once can be very useful, and only took about 2 minutes to set up. The only 'disadvantage' I can see in it is that the light coming out of LCD is not aligned or polarized ideally for the orientation, so color/brightness response is badly broken (this doesn't likely matter much if you're just reading informational text), and (in my case) start seeing fine horizontal lines (due to the now horizontal pixels) into your vision after long viewing sessions (this goes away after a bit, and did not really bother me). Widescreen monitors have little practical advantage over, say, 1600x1200 panels in a business usage context; I have a suspicion that they were pushed by the industry as they'd be cheaper to make. Even though 1920x1080 screen size gives more total pixels than 1600x1200 by around 10%, I gain much more utility from the extra 120 lines in the latter than the 320 extra pixels of width.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Xerox Alto, one of the first PC (1973) had it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto/
I wrote the Windows NT/2K/XP etc. driver for this functionality many years ago.
Good luck using a portrait monitor to look at spreadsheets - it'd drive you mad by the end of the day.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
My eyes are aligned horizontally, not vertically.
Sure, I can make the case for more vertical space. But not at the expense of horizontal.
The only thing we use vertically is paper, and that's because we rarely consider the whole page in one go - only caring about one half at a time. And that makes it two pieces of landscape A5.
Books are portrait, I'll give you that. But you unfold them into a landscape A5-ish or large book with multiple columns (because of the difficulty of printing very near the gutter in the middle).
Children's picture books? Almost all landscape.
Movies? Landscape.
Photographs? Mostly landscape and certainly specified in landscape size and cameras are mostly designed for landscape operation (except when making portraits - for which we shockingly use them portrait!)
You have two eyes, one left, one right. Together they focus on the object of interest.
If you want a BIGGER landscape monitor so you can put a full A4 piece of paper on it - do that. Get it in landscape format and it will be wide enough to visualise two pieces at the same time at full height. That's not true if you flip the portrait/landscapes in those sentences.
Portrait displays have specific and specialised uses. And almost all of them leave horizontal space in everyone's visions (sometimes for a purpose, e.g. portraits without lots of side-art on them, sometimes because of cost - airport displays not being wider than necessary). If you fill that horizontal space, you get a landscape display of the same height that is suited for all purposes.
I can't see the case for portrait monitors for ordinary desktops at all except to "be different" or in very specialised applications where a landscape monitor of the same height will do twice as much.
and that would be great to watch instagrammmm
Until Bennett Haselton writes a two page polemic about why portrait orientation is better, no thank you.
How hard is it to make toolbars dockable on the side? My monitors are just about tall enough to display 8.5x11" sheet in 1:1 (not quite, with about 10.75" of vertical display area). But using Word means giving up nearly 1.75" at the top and nearly 0.5" at the bottom. I know I can make the ribbon hideable.
Chrome, Adobe Reader eat up top & bottom space too.
Let me move all that stuff off to one side!
This, obviously, didn't precisely demand 4:3 (and a variety of different ratios and even shapes were available at various times, I still covet one of the circular ones); but the manufacturing and structural demands of relatively cheaply building big glass tubes full of nothing and electron guns likely constrained some of the more extreme variations that occasionally crop up with flat panels. Aside from some really old or odd circular units, being square came about by customer demand; but I suspect that it would not have been a cost-saving measure to switch from 4:3 to 16:9 if they had to build CRTs to suit.
If the author of this piece was smart enough to stop using windows full-screen, he'd realise that it's very useful to be able to view (at least partially) multiple windows at the same time.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Portrait mode is ideal for watching all those shitty, shaky, worthless portrait videos that people are capturing with their phones.
Yes, I'd like to pretend I'm looking at the world through a keyhole through a toilet paper roll through a straw! I can't wait for the "Best 2:16 Aspect Ratio Film" award at Cannes next year.
KILL ME NOW
We have the possibility to run multiple programs at the same time. And each have their windows. Like side by side. These are called multitasing and graphical user interface. If you are browsing fullscreen, go get a tablet.
I use monitors 24"+ so i can fit documents 2 pages side by side or i can fiddle with a bunch of putty/term shit on one side and watch tv on the other. What kind of cunt writes this shit.
That use their monitors in portrait are DTP types. For we systems types we like the screen real estate that landscape provides.
.
Indeed, I do take heart to what the article says, as the individual windows on my desktop are taller than they are wide. But If I were to flip my monitor to portrait mode, I'd get less usable screen real estate, not more.
The author of the article seems to use the desktop monitor the way a tablet is used, i.e., a full-screen window for each app. I do not do that on my desktop, I do not want to do that on my desktop.
The author of the article should try using a desktop monitor more efficiently, and stop putting everything in a full screen window. ;)
I hated it because I could scarcely read what he was doing when I sat next to him due to the viewing angle.
I have rotated both my monitors 45 degrees. So they're half landscape, half portrait: I see (some) long lines, and I see (bits of) a lot of lines.
no, I don't have a sig
I have a suspicion that they were pushed by the industry as they'd be cheaper to make.
Early TVs were 4:3 ratio because theaters were 4:3 ratio. Theaters became 16:9 ratio to try to fight back against the scourge of VHS home-viewership. Later TVs were 16:9 because later theaters were 16:9. Monitors followed TV ratios because they are the same screens, but with more simplified inputs (no built-in antennae for example).
16:9 has a benefit for the majority of the population who have 2 working eyes. Our field of view is wider than it is tall. There are many scenarios where a desktop monitor or even a 80 diagonal inch TV against the wall is insufficient, but there are many more scenarios where the 16:9 ratio is either sufficient itself or a sufficient baseline to combine with other screens of the same resolution to achieve a useful result. Here's a stand to hold six.
Seriously... Same PPI but a big square?
Currently I run with one landscape and one portrait, and I hate having any window span between the two. I'd rather have a single 4k screen, but the Seiki solution just seems hokey, so I am holding out till next year when we are likely to have a lot of the vaporware 4k stuff come to fruition. A ~40" monitor with a decent refresh rate and no weird mouse lag issues would be pretty optimum for my stuff (lots of 2D IC layout and 3D EM simulation mixed with lots of cadence schematic entry).
Subpixels orient horizontally.
Video editing, Photoshop, system administration, Accounting (spreadsheets are WIDE as they are TALL, so there's an argument for Square monitors)
I can fin a lot of reasons that landscape is more useful. How about monitors not sucking and have the ability to rotate easily when needed AND have the polarizer wide enough that you dont get the wierd visual effects when you turn an LCD sideways.... I.E. cheap and crap monitors from AOC and LG.
my portable USB AOC monitor is useless when in portrait.. it has just enough of a contrast difference between my left and right eye in that mode to be distracting as hell.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Then put the website you're reading in one 960px wide window and the document you're writing in another.
Where are the square 4000x4000-pixel monitors?
It's really hard to type with when it's standing on edge.
The first thing many people do is expand the window to fill the whole screen - I find this especially true of windows users.
I usually have multiple windows, tiled so that I can monitor what is going on in the various windows - call it multitasking. This way I can monitor other program status and adjust my workflow while waiting for something to finish.
A while back I had asked a reference librarian for assistance. And, before I had a chance to stop her, she had closed all my open windows, except the window I asked about, then expanded it. Maybe its a simple minded approach, but it drives me crazy when people do that to my work environment.
... one landscape, one portrait and one that's square for interdisciplinary compatibility and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Since when is /. for normal users?
Since when do Slashdot users make up enough of the market to justify economies of scale, especially with the opportunity cost of not using the same capital to offer a mass-market product?
There's a reason why the standard went to the landscape, adapt to it or die
While reading one website, what do they write to? For example, I might have the featured article in half the screen and a comment composition form (on Slashdot, Reddit, Twitter, Buttbook, or the like) in the other.
What most posts seem to be missing is that you can only read so much at once anyway. I mean seeing an entire website (or an entire news article) I don't think would even be any nicer. Your eyes then have to travel a lot more, it seems almost that scrolling is about as easier as craning your neck from the top of a screen to the bottom.
What about neck injury for always tilting your head up an down.
Have people become so memorized with phone screen sized apps they have forgotten they can have multiple windows open at once? Even when reading news I'll have another website or application open along side the first.
I don't need a super long list of news articles, more load when I scroll. For me it feels more natural to have two windows open side by side rather than one above the other.
Setting a system so that 'maximize' only expands a window to fill half of your giant wide screen
In Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, pressing Win+Left or Win+Right (or dragging a window's title bar to the left or right edge) will "Snap" it, which expands it to fill half the screen. In previous versions of Windows, you could do something similar by clicking one window's title in the taskbar, Ctrl+right-clicking another, and choosing Tile Vertically.
Portrait displays were great when monitors were still 4:3 aspect ratio rather than 16:9. You could get a desktop width of 1024, and be just like a standard monitor, except much taller. You can even see entire pages in your word processor. But if you rotate a 16:9 monitor, it just looks absurdly tall and hard to deal with.
Get an iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard.
I'm curious why you recommended that brand. What's its advantage over a laptop? And what's an iPad's advantage over an Android or Windows 8.1 tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard?
Portrait monitors were fine until two-page monitors came out. In the era of 1080p, two-page monitors are cheap.
Sure, video playback and gaming are some key exceptions
Well, with all the tards with VVS, I suppose even video is not always an exception either.
Vertical Video Syndrome - A PSA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You're not shooting that right dummy!
In reality what you might be looking for is a decent size monitor. I worked for a while on an iMac (29 or 27 or whatever the biggest was 3 years ago) ... and with a portrait 19 Dell it was pretty good. I had all the code on the iMac, and site + firebug or 3 terminals (running console apps on servers) were on the dell.
Currenty I am running 3x 23 1080p monitors and I feel your pain. The monitors have no decent mount and so I am stuck in a "widescreen gaming" setup for now.
I actually have a 3x23'' 1080p linux desktop, and 3 macs on 3 other monitors for work. I have communications on one (mail, office, skype, etc), some house controls on the other (music player/etc) ... and one for web testing for web projects (or monitoring interfaces for non-web daemons/servers).... In addition I have a 1080p 42 inch TV with a mac mini in the office for video/music playback (tube amp for music and DTS for movies) ...
It is a little overkill, but I never have a "where do I put this window so I can always see it" problem :) .. works well if you both run servers and write code....
Switching between windows is really a time waster multitasker process interrupting horror. Easier to say "these 2 are for terminals, these are for netbeans, and the big one is where the site is tested in 4 different browsers"
BUT ...
However, what I am really looking forward to is a price drop on the 4K TVs. a 46''-ish 4K would get rid of multiple cards, converters, eyefinity, xinerama, and all the shit that complicates life on both OSX/ Linux / Windows.
This article has the same bullshit mentality that Windows 8 Metro has... The assumptions that windows MUST ALWAYS be full screen. Guess what? I NEVER do this, There is no point in doing it. I like having my windows tiled on top of each other where I can see the corners behind which ever window I'm working in, so when the status changes in another app, I can see it instantly. Switch between apps is as simple as clicking on the various VISIBLE windows, rather than switching away from the apps, to the taskbar, then back to the apps (think about this task in a multi-monitor setup). And on top of that, their only case study seems to be for reading fixed-width content? The whole world doesnt revolve around just this one type of information display...
You've been using your monitor wrong this whole time
No I haven't. I'm using it just how I like it, thanks.
Condescending headline, much?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Scientific research has shown again and again that we can read longer lines much more efficiently than we can read short lines
Up to a point. True, 75 columns are better than 25. But the research I've read concludes that line lengths past 80 columns (roughly 36-40em) cause the reader to accidentally skip or repeat lines more often.
Abiatha Swelter's comment on the article makes a good point: "Today's wide monitors make working with two-page spreads easy. In my work, I often have multiple apps and documents open side-by-side. What you say makes sense if you're mainly using single apps full screen, but who does that?"
I agree with Abiatha Swelter.
not that hard...
Also for business/ excel and powerpoint require landschap
Why not ask for monitors with a 1:1 aspect ratio? Two 25" by 25" monitors would be awesome (or one 50x50). :)
The article just talks about web-reading, and how more and more webpages are being responsive (for mobile reasons) in ways that actually now optimize sites for vertical orientation over horizontal.
However, from a coding and word processing* perspective, vertical layout is a bit better, too, as it allows you to see more of the text and the text's context, than horizontal mode does. Thus, most developers who pay attention to such things do use both, as the first 5point comment suggests above.
In fact, that was the actual vision of the PARC crew that invented GUI and WYSIWYG back in the 70s: the Xerox Alto workstation they created did have a vertical monitor, for this very reason: the idea was that if you were using a word processor to show you a page's layout, seeing the whole page on screen was the desired effect. They discovered it improved coding productivity once they were using the workstation to produce the software.
(that said, it is NOT better for spreadsheets or powerpoint, or database-editing tools, so there we are.)
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
The author of the article seems to use the desktop monitor the way a tablet is used, i.e., a full-screen window for each app.
Why are tablets even used that way when a 7" screen is as big as two 4-5" phone screens and a 10" tablet is as big as four? I want to be able to read a page in half the screen and write comments in the other half.
Disclaimer, I didn't read the article. I've experienced nerve damage in my neck, and moving my head up and down to look at a vertical screen would definitely not work for me. I'm curious if there would be long term RSI type concerns for others.
Just another day in Paradise
So you instead of a computer you want a tablet/smartphone.
I use four open application windows, two on each side of the screen by using windows snapping (Windows Key + Right/Left) to position the windows evenly on the left and right side of the screen, essentially creating four screens out of two monitors both on landscape. It's hard to do that simply with a portrait monitor you just end up re-sizing windows over and over with the mouse.
That mostly depends on whether your operating system's graphics stack can handle vertically stacked subpixels. The appearance controls in Xfce, for example, can switch to vertical subpixels, leaving the top and bottom of round letters looking great. But then horizontal subpixels are probably better for italic and oblique text like this.
Apple did this decades ago.
And more moronic ideas from the cheap seats.
Really?
This is why I use a 39" 4k TV as my main monitor. It is like having 4x 1080p monitors but without the gaps between screens. It also lets you do exactly what this webpage is describing by using half your monitor.
I have 3 24" monitors. It's hard on my neck if I have to look the far sides of the display. I flipped the monitors on each side and I don't have to turn my neck too much. In the vertically positioned monitors I arrange my windows like they are docked top and bottom (wish Windows support this function.) The result is I still have 6 working spaces in 3 monitors.
I find that having the monitor in portrait orientation is unbelievably annoying. Scrolling vertically is trivial and painless, so I have, in effect, unlimited vertical space no matter what the orientation is. However, horizontal space is at a premium unless the monitor is huge. And when the monitor is huge, putting it in portrait orientation means I have to move my head up and down a lot to see everything.
Landscape is the only thing that makes sense to me.
All the examples in TFA show web pages that only take up half the width of the screen. I naively ask why these web pages have to have a fixed width, and why they cant expand to fill the width of the browser window?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Neither Android nor Windows tablets were available when I got my iPad.
Android tablets came out before iPad 2, so you probably bought a first-generation iPad. Did you just not want to have to re-buy your word processing software when you upgraded from iPad 1 to iPad Air? For people buying a tablet now, what advantage does an iPad still have over a Galaxy Tab (Android) or Transformer Book (Windows 8.1) nowadays?
You're Holding It Wrong ...
aaaaaaa
The article shows pictures of running apps in full screen on a wide screen monitor, resulting in huge amounts of wasted space on the screen.
And, I'm sorry, but if you haven't discovered that windows can be sized and don't need to be ran in full screen ... you're a moron
There are some apps which make sens to run in full screen, because they have a lot of stuff in it.
But a web browser? Really? You can have two side by side windows of web browsers open on a wide screen monitor.
I'm not saying there aren't cases where running in portrait mode might not be useful. I'm sure there are, because portrait monitors have existed for a long time. But I am saying the arguments and pictures used to support this claim are facile, simplistic, and written by someone who believes all apps run in feel screen all the time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I read two pages at a time, one with each eye.
It's really convenient to rotate the display on a pen slate (or convertible in slate mode) as appropriate to suit the sort of work / activity one is doing at a given moment.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
my screen is bolted to my keyboard, wtf am I supposed to do??
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I thought this was a good idea and got a monitor that can work both in portrait and landscape mode (Samsung SyncMaster 2343bw). It didn't work. Yes, I can see more code in eclipse and yes, you get more content on screen in web pages. But that's where the benefits stop.
The main thing that irked me is that the main content - usually close to the top of the screen was not in front of me anymore. It was somewhere high up, and felt it was always a bit far. Indeed, with a portrait monitor in a normal desk setup, the top of the screen is some 30-40% further away from your eyes than with a landscape screen. That makes it much less appealing place to put things. Also, the top of the screen is 30-40% further away than the bottom of the screen. If you have two windows tiled e.g. dev env on top and a browser for docs in the bottom, your eyes must continually adjust for distance. By comparison, landscape view is much more comfortable.
Anyway, it was so annoying I flipped the monitor back and was never tempted to go portrait again.
How long do you think it will take Microsoft and other makers of word processing programs to realize they should have an option to put the controls at the side of the document instead of in 5 or 6 row banners/strips at the top and bottom of the document.
If controls are at the side, we can edit a whole page at a time on a typical landscape monitor such as a laptop's.
What we have here is a failure to consider the primary use case of the application.
Ok sure, now that we have a gazillion pixels high even in landscape mode, it's not so bad, but what about the 20 years before that, when the way they did it was an astoundingly bad design idea that everyone put up with.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What if we invented a system that would display a different application in each segment of the screen.
Let us call it doors or something like that.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Slow news day /.?
Let's flip it backwards, so it faces away from you! You will be more productive that way!
Maybe this guy hasn't heard of resizable application windows, invented over 30 years ago, and which render his "allow me to blow your mind" bravado into the realization that he's not as bright as he thought.
Just size the browser so it uses up half the screen, then you can have other stuff in the remaining half. You can use a tiling window manager, or just configure easy tiling shortcuts to set up your windows that way.
Using a single, maximized window at that resolution is doing it wrong (tm).
Fucking American idiots.
The word is "wide", as in "wider than it is tall". You idiots, you can't even get basic words like "wide" and "long" right.
Isn't this because the monitor industry stole some pixels? The 1920x1200 monitor vs 1920x1080 chops off a good portion of the screen real estate.
Hell, a good 1560x1440 or more is perfect for side by side, no need to flip. (for me anyways)
When my Black MacBook (2006) gave up the ghost after eight years of faithful, I switched over to my Windows 8.1 computer. Since my data was in platform-neutral formats, I had no problem making the switch. I guess I'm the exception to the rule.
Why do I get a distinct impression that this entire discussion topic is like of tupperware ladies?
"I use this grinder in my kitchen, this lipstick is good, that moisturizer is good"?
But the real question is, Why is everyone going fullscreen while surfing? Don't you have PHB's micromanaging you?!
Honestly, why does that gets posted on slashdot? Turning monitors sideways is an flipping old feature. And people where using it now for years. Even my professor has one of his screens sideways. The old Xerox machine with the first graphical UI had such screen orientation. For documents it makes much more sense to have it that way. In programming most tools fill up the screen on the left and right. Therefore, for that purpose portrait mode is not an option as long as the tools are that way. But for writing, viewing and editing text portrait is perfect. And I do not need an article about that fact, promoting it like it is some super genius idea.
I had to work with some monitors used in air traffic control once. They were 2048x2048. Way too tall for me, I could only use them for short periods for normal work without getting neck-ache from looking up and down all the time. Air traffic controllers have them at a fairly horizontal angle (like a table top) so don't have quite as much nodding to do. Had an eight foot wide 5120x2560 as well that was lovely as long as you didn't mind having to sit five feet from it and having everyone in a 50 foot range reading your emails.
Humans can look left and right either by eye movement or neck rotation. Both are very easy on the muscles. Looking up and down is much harder and will give you RSI eventually. Get used to having two windows (or three) next to each other and your productivity will improve. Even my child plays Minecraft on the left half while picking up tips on youtube in the right half.
subpixed rendering aka cleartype does not work properly on a rotated monitor.
Mouse wheel is intended for vertical scrolling. Hold [key] to scroll horizontally is a very rare feature, at least in programs I use.
And I don't like word wrap (for coding).
Also, my monitor does rotate. I've tried vertical. I did not care for it. It's a waste of my horizontal periphery.
So uh... fuck off with your suggestions.
The Case For Flipping Your Monitor From Landscape to Portrait
I have two monitors, one portrait for code view, one landscape for all other kind of shit (in particular to look at side-by-side diffs). And when I work with three monitors, I keep two protrait and one landscape. Basically the formula is one landscape, and everything else portrait.
For anyone who cares to work with code on a daily basis, this is just common sense. I cannot believe that developers have to make a case for it.
This is like "making a case to wipe your crack after taking a dump, and not before" kind of thing.
We've been capable of doing this since 1980's. Even the early Xerox word processors had this orientation. The author must be a hipster.
The author is a dumbass. He thinks his computer is a big smartphone that only runs one application at a time.
Proverbs 21:19
Two words as to why horizontal is better: "progressive lenses".
EXACTLY. I love subpixel anti-aliasing so I won't rotate the display until that finally works but I've wanted to for years. My 2nd display is 4:3 and I've repaired it twice to keep it going. I'm largely waiting for enough idiots to buy UHD TVs to drive prices down (because those only look good in the store, when you sit 3m away you can't see the extra pixels but as a monitor I can put it to practical use.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Multiple columns works great for paged media but it's not awesome for continuous media like a scrolling web page canvas. If you divide a long article into two or three columns then the content in the next column will usually be so far away from what you're currently reading as to be irrelevant.
I think a better use of wider screens would be to place visual aids and asides in those margins and leave the text unbroken, vs. the usual trend on the web of inserting images as horizontal breaks in the content.
Sadly it's unlikely to get better since we seem to be trending towards smaller screens right now, and "mobile first" design techniques tend to start with the small screen size and scale up rather than the other way around.
I much prefer a larger single monitor to dual widescreen monitors. That way, I can have two applications side-by-side and have enough room for each. So at least a 24" monitor and maybe up to 30".
At my previous job, all the IT people were to be given dual 19" widescreen monitors. But a 19" widescreen monitor only has the vertical size of a 15" regular monitor. So for me it was a step backwards. And I agree that the extra space on the side did not help at all. Especially in Microsoft Word that limits the page width to a certain size on the screen. And when browsing or writing code that doesnt take up all 255 characters.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
The case of rolling the windows down in the car vs leaving them closed and opening up the vents.
Who the fuck doesn't know this already? Buy a pivoting monitor if you give a fuck.
Or buy a large monitor and meta+left, meta+right. For fucks sake can /. stop posting this garbage?
I've never thought of widescreen as such... I've always thought of it as "short screen"... I wish I could get proper aspect monitors but they're almost impossible to find these days especially on laptops.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Nah.
The only time you need a monitor is for a PC which now days implies the user doing some kind of content creation.
You did "content creation" by writing this comment.
fixed width is 90th
Completely retarded.
As if you can read all content at the same time.
There's a reason the mouse wheel was invented.
Idiots.
It spends 99% of the time in landscape and maybe 1% in portrait mode. I can have any orientation I want and this is what I prefer.
Ultimately it's all about the aspect ratio of whatever you are looking at, with an additional consideration for whether information on-screen is wider (or taller) than can comfortably fit there. Oh, and it's relevant too what are the consequences of not seeing all the vertical or horizontal information. You don't always need to see everything. Certain tasks are adequately handled simply by scanning the screen, not reading everything.
and it wants its news back. Seriously I've used quad monitors (two portrait plus two landscape, all 1600x1200) since.. oh god I can't even remember but it's forever ago, way more than half a decade. It's awesome tho; text editing & ssh FTW on portrait, "everything else" (mostly web) on landscape.
[FrLz]
I have 3 monitors in portrait mode at work and it sucks for reading Slashdot. I have to scroll left and right to read the comments!
I'm seriously considering "going normal".
How would I place 3 xterms next to each other otherwise?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have an ultrawide IPS monitor for work, as there isn't quite enough space on my small desk for dual monitors of a decent size... But if I snap 1 window left and one right then I get two very decently sized windows to work in. (Or for software development, the IDE on one side and notes/documentation on the other)
I have tried this years ago.
It is incredibly uncomfortable to have to angle your head up or down to view content outside of the natural position of your neck, which only accommodates a very small angular range. Thus, a tall vertical monitor really increases body and eye strain. You will end up not using the top or bottom of that monitor.
Turning your head side to side induces much less strain. Additionally, most eyeglasses wearers (and people in general) have wider corrected fields of view horizontally than vertically.
The most comfortable solution is to have your primary monitor horizontally oriented and a secondary monitor vertically oriented. Either way, properly oriented textual content should be adjustable with the window aspect ratio.
... at least for gaming, the winner is 3 x 30" LCDs pivoted to portrait mode, according to MaximumPC magazine in 2011:
http://www.maximumpc.com/artic...
I don't have this setup but tried pivoting (smaller) monitors before (work apps, not games). I hit these issues:
1. Mainstream monitors (22"-24") are too narrow for some websites or applications
2. The 'Colour inversion' effect
This is worst with TN panels.You basically need the panel more or less perfectly vertical and have to look at it dead-on.
Even with TFT IPS panels, there's something a tiny bit 'off' that I can't put my finger on - its as if colour reproduction was designed to be optimal in landscape mode. Or something different about pixel spacing, or how sub-pixel colour elements stack up next to each other... Just guessing here.
3. For desktop use, you end up bobbing your head up and down.
why is this worthy of being an article?
This only works if you have relatively small monitors. I have 24" monitors so if I put them in portrait I find myself having to bob my head up and down just to see the content on screen. Not something you want to do for an entire workday.
Besides, many if not most of the productivity applications nowadays are designed around wide screens, with your tools on the sides and the content in the middle. Even most websites are designed like this nowadays. Sure you can configure some of that stuff to work in a portrait setup, but you'll be constantly fighting the current.
Besides, when you need to use your laptop you'll have to use the landscape layout anyway, so might as well just make it work for you.
I suggest that if you have a monitor which is small enough to work well in portrait, then you're doing it wrong. Get a large monitor instead (or two) and learn to avoid the need to maximize everything.
The price difference between small and large monitors is negligible these days anyway, unless you need something special like super accurate colours or something.
Better yet, get a monitor with a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than 16:9 for that extra bit of vertical space. I got a couple of Dell U2412M monitors some time ago and it's been brilliant. Thinking of adding a 3rd one actually.
Having upright monitors for 10 years now, but i also use some hotkeys to move individual windows to fullscreen/top/bottom of screen or move them to other monitors. That really made me love upright monitors.
This is really a spam i mean just some "clever" advertisement, this is so awesome, please, by all means keep on using Slashdot for increasing traffic to your site.
Due to it being cheaper to produce one resolution panels, 1920x1200 monitors (especially in notebooks) are harder to find than 1920x1080 (useless for work, great for watching tv)
I like the idea of being able to have multiple windows open which might not see the benefit from portrait mode.
Honestly I almost wish for 4:3 monitors again - better for work, worse for tv.
I have two portraits on a standing desk, if only M$ was smart enough to incorporate Dual Monitor Taskbar things would be fine and dandy
Great for Google.. but... not so much else. I pictured a few apps I use regularly, to see if portrait wouild be a help or hindrance. Hindrance every time.
If you did this at least all of the idiot vertical cell phone videos would fit.
I'd rather have a monitor that was 24" wide AND 24" high so I can do whatever I want without the need to rotate it. So what if I don't use it all when watching a movie? I'm not so psychotic that I have to fill every pixel all the time.
I have one monitor (of 2) in portrait orientation. You would be surprised how many webapps do not render nicely, leaving the bottom half of the available area empty and half of the content off-screen to the right.
Sometimes the (questionable) benefits of an alternative layout are outweighed by the annoyances that come from being an edge case.
Authors know this.
That is why all content looks wrong.
Content authors of all kinds seem to have better
and more displays than their customers. Fonts
are too small, page layout is all wrong, page breaks
are all wrong.
Phones that rotate make authors that care confused....
CSS always pulls in crud that has a different style view
of the end page result than all the other CSS authors.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Wow, that's some hard-hitting tech news...
Agreed.
The examples given in the article (yes I read it) show badly designed web sites that assume you have a certain fixed width display.
I use Stylish, so I can override bad CSS on the remote side. Bad, as in "Should be sued if they are a commercial business for violating user accessibility for people with poor eyesight". Bad, as in "If I make the text displayed by my browser big enough to read, then the website breaks and has text on top of text". Bad, as in "Since we can't tell what size width someone has, we assume everyone has 800 / 1150 / NNN pixels and count by pixels since everyone has the exact same eyesight, monitor quality, and everything else that our programmers have".
(I am not a lawyer. But there is a law in the united states of america about taking reasonable measures to ensure access to handicapped people, and bad eyesight that requires glasses and/or larger text is recognized as handicapped. Working with a system -- a computer -- that can trivially handle larger text and display it is reasonable measures. Taking that system, and forcing it to only work properly with small text should be actionable. Doing this as a business, and then claiming "We have rights, you cannot sue us" is just plain wrong.)
I have gotten used to having to patch bad CSS, and then update/maintain those patches. I have a large collection of forum / message board CSS overrides, and most forum sites for me now are "figure out which of my existing templates this is using, and set that template to include this site".
I have my browsing using the full width of my browser window, whether my browser window is the full width of my screen or not.
And, resolution is the other issue that this FA gets wrong. I would love -- *LOVE* -- to have a higher resolution monitor give me -- wait for it -- Ta DAH! -- *Better Resolution!*.
Instead, almost universally, "higher monitor resolution" == "smaller dots, and more of them".
Do you have any idea how hard it is to work at 72 points per inch on the screen? There are only two ways that I know of, and both break a lot of software:
1. Set my monitor resolution to 72 DPI. Never mind that my monitor can do 92, or 120 DPI, and that would give me a higher quality display of that 72 points per inch. Oh yea -- I forgot that some systems (hello microsoft windows brand graphical operating system) think that 92 DPI on screen is the normal and actually think that 120 DPI is bigger text.
2. Get a retina display, at 2 to 1 display. Most "aware" programs will see 144 DPI, and display something that is the right size; most "un-aware" programs will see 72 DPI and still work but with transparently sharper text. Screen recorders seem to be the only thing that get the display wrong.
Now, what about someone that -- surprise, surprise -- needs larger text? I actually want a 25% magnification to read stuff on-screen. I can read print at 12 points (*) just fine -- but that probably has to do with print being around 400-1200 DPI. I can't read 12 point at 72 DPI on-screen well at all.
(*): And, it does not help that "points" is not "points" at low point levels. I can change my font size, and below about 25 point fonts the change is not consistent. In some fonts, 12 and 13 are identical except for being "darker"; in others, it's 13 and 14. The same "point size" is significantly different character size in different fonts. Etc.
Even the question of "How do you handle better resolution" for text isn't easy. If I am displaying a 12 point font at 92 DPI screen resolution, do I take the outline produced by 12 points, and scale it to fit the higher resolution display, or do I take the outline from the higher point-sized characters, and display that unaltered? Since I get different glyphs (patterns of dots) in both cases, what's the best way?
====
TL; DR:
1. TFA basically says "Badly designed websites cannot use wide monitors, so don't fix the websites, wreck your display setup."
2. TFA basically says "Monitors only come in low resolution
Speak in true visual terms, pease.
Longer means nothing when viewing a rectangular form.
If you mean widre, then say wider. If you mean taller or higher, then say so.
I don't understand what "longer" means.
Dave
I do graphics work and run three and somtimes four monitprs. I have recently taken an HD plasma amd mounted this 50 inch screen vertically onto a wonderful heavy duty caster equipped stand which I,can position perfectly and use that screen to view completed vertical format images. At times I will rotate a computer monitor which my Dell allows easily. However as os common for graphics pele I,work with Mac and I want to emaphasize here that Apple ought to get their shit together on the lousy ergonomic position of,the unadjistable monitors..They can tilt up or down..that it. One has to buy a model with an ISO adapter model if you want to rally make adjustments or rotate the screen. Tjat is absurd considering the wondrous quality of their screens. They do not even make a stand but sell a third party one. this is the biggest deficit I must levy at Apple. They surely need to think about this situation. Dell certainly has.
Are you keeping up with the Commodore? Because the Commodore is keeping up with you.
Who would have thought we'd be back to 30Hz refresh displays after all this time.
I giggle at the hipsters with standing desks and vertical monitors. It's hard to be unique when your too busy being trendy.