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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!
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.
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.
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.
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?!
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?
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.
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
Subpixels orient horizontally.
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?
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.
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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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!
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.
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.
No, it has plenty point to it, it makes everything much crisper looking.
Look at the screen of any person with a 4K Mac, they're not using a microscopic font. Their font sizes are the same size as on the older hardware, but they get more pixels per character.
If I want to compare code, side-by-side in landscape mode is better. I use the the diff tool and it helps having the extra horizontal space.
When I can writing code (maybe it is just me) but I like to see as many lines of code as possible on the screen as possible. That is why most coders reduce their type size to just above micro print. It sure would be nice to have some more vertical lines. I find that too much scrolling just breaks up being in the zone.
The software I use most often actually works best on a system thats 1600x1200 or some similar aspect. The prevalence of 1080p has been a real pain. But rotating to portrait mode would be worse.
That particular product, incidentally, already allows putting controls in any of the 4 borders and I do have some of them running down the side.
Websites often are either slideshows, in which case orientation isn't really an issue or they are long, narrow things that run down like a papyrus scroll. For that sort of thing, portrait is not a bad idea. I read most websites on my tablet in portrait.
Unfortunately, I prefer the handly 7-inch one-hand tablet and not all "mobile" websites are really "mobile" enough for that screen size.
but I use Windows 8 you insensitive clod!
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.