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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.
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!
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.
Portrait monitors were all the rage back in the 90's. All the desktop publishing people used them for working with Aldus Pagemaker.
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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.
I use my monitor rotated in portrait mode and rotated 270 degrees.
I've rotated my screen 360 degrees :-)
"The vast majority of computer-related tasks see no benefit from a screen that is longer than it is tall."
Seriously, most of todays screens are so big that you can fit 2 pages side-by-side, which is a lot more convenient than one page at a time in portrait mode. Ditto for individual windows. Rotating them into portrait mode will cause neck strain as you have to tilt your head back to properly see the top.
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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.
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.
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I would do this at work for writing code, but alas, I currently work on Windows, and its support for portrait monitors, let alone landscape+portrait, is broken enough that the path of least pain is just to use landscape alone.
Specifically, there seems to be no way to get proper antialiased fonts in portrait mode. While ClearType makes Windows fonts quite tolerable, it doesn't (and arguably can't) work in portrait mode. Traditional antialiasing could work, but for some inexplicable reason Windows disables it for a large range of font sizes (something like 7..13).
Even worse, you can either use ClearType on all of your monitors or none of them. On portrait monitors Windows, when using ClearType, still renders the fonts as if it was landscape; the result is an incredibly blurry, colored mess. So if you have one portrait monitor, you have to tolerate aliased fonts on all of your displays.
Rubbish. You cannot read long lines without guidance, research has shown that for centuries. Stop lying.
I guess you've never seen a regular web user. They don't write documents at the same time they're reading a website.
They just read websites.
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