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The Widescreen Contradiction

Most applications that we seem to be using more of, seem to be better suited to vertical screen orientations, such as the kind you’d use a Tablet PC with. Think Word, Acrobat, web browsers – page-oriented applications, and chat clients, music players (playlists) – list-oriented ones. Only Outlook, Excel and movie players are truly “widescreen” oriented.

Using Word on a widescreen monitor is ridiculous – the application leaves areas as wide as the page itself on either side, so you’re only using a third of the available screen real estate. Using the full-page view in Acrobat (or Word) makes the text unreadable.

Notice the way we’re using multiple monitors lately, prima facie to achieve a widescreen effect. Think deeper, and we’ll realize it isn’t that we want a widescreen display per se, but that we want multiple vertically oriented applications simultaenously. Maximizing an application window will maxmize it within its screen, not across all displays.

I’m wondering if there’s a fundamental contradiction between the way we’re developing display technology, and developing applications.

What do you think, dear reader?


August 11, 2007 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Insights ·  3 Comments


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3 Comments


  1. Beena Venugopal on August 12th, 2007 8:28 am

    Could primarily be because of the way we read/speed read – we scan the central part of the document – hence makes sense to have “vertical screen orientated” applications (I’d say even Outlook ought to be here!). Whereas watching movies, pictures or any such application which requires capturing a lot of info in one glance would require wide-screen- again primarily because of the way the human eye works! So it is pretty sensible to have two kinds of display. Nice observation though!

  2. zoxcleb on August 13th, 2007 2:39 pm

    u are relying on the thought that screens are being used primarily for work. in the age that we live in now, computer displays are being used more and more as a substitute entertainment center. games, movies, and the like.. not so much for excel or word processing. for work, such as that u have mentioned, one rarely needs screens larger than 21″. for other uses, the larger, the more real the experience.

  3. Narayan on October 30th, 2007 8:06 am

    I completely agree. Thats why I have made a blog on my website which has more verticle spread compared to other pages of my website.

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