Support this blog.
Buy from Amazon
2006-11-01
Portrait Mode
Computer screens are getting proportionally wider, following the trend of TVs. Sure, it makes them better for watching movies, but how much often do you use the computer screens for movies as oppose to, I don't know, as a normal computer?
Some people argue that wider screens are better because the way human's field of vision extends further to the sides than vertically. Or you can see lame excuses like the one from the first link saying you can see more columns in a spreadsheet (what if you want to see, hm, more rows?).
Now that I need to do more coding (both for work and for finishing my stupid dissertation), I decided to turn both my home desktop and office desktop to portrait mode. This is one of the best recently things I have done to myself. Now I can see more lines of code (instead of more code per line...) and being more efficient.
What's surprising to me, though, is that I found that my browsing experience also improves after switching to portrait mode. This is because most web sites, most notably newspaper web sites, try to be "portable" and limit the width, so my new width of 1,200 pixels is still much more than enough, yet I can also read articles more efficiently with less scrolling. I guess I'll keep it in portrait mode until I finish my dissertation and start playing games again...
Some people argue that wider screens are better because the way human's field of vision extends further to the sides than vertically. Or you can see lame excuses like the one from the first link saying you can see more columns in a spreadsheet (what if you want to see, hm, more rows?).
Now that I need to do more coding (both for work and for finishing my stupid dissertation), I decided to turn both my home desktop and office desktop to portrait mode. This is one of the best recently things I have done to myself. Now I can see more lines of code (instead of more code per line...) and being more efficient.
What's surprising to me, though, is that I found that my browsing experience also improves after switching to portrait mode. This is because most web sites, most notably newspaper web sites, try to be "portable" and limit the width, so my new width of 1,200 pixels is still much more than enough, yet I can also read articles more efficiently with less scrolling. I guess I'll keep it in portrait mode until I finish my dissertation and start playing games again...
