Twitter: I'm amazed at how much screen real estate is lost by misconfigured Word 2003 toolbars on the average employee's computer. http://ff.im/5r99 4 hrs ago

Aug

11

The Widescreen Contradiction

Insights 

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?


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