[shoopy]

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I talk about aspect ratios with average consumers. Most people really do believe--probably through HDTV marketing--that wider screens are better. The lion's share of most people's time on the Internet is spent reading and scolling vertically, yet our devices are optimized for watching little sixty second movie clips at a time. Why wouldn't you want to make the 95% case more pleasurable at the expense of a few black bars on the top and bottom of your movie? Besides, most Internet videos need to be upscaled to fill the screen anyways, the detail is mostly interpolated anyhow.

[jamesbritt]

... that wider screens are better.

That might kinda sorta almost even be true, except that 1080p (1920x1080) is not wider than WUXGA (1920x1200).

It's just shorter.

But "wide screen" just sound so much nicer than "short screen."

[schraeds]

The ratio makes it wider, proportionally.

[PuercoPop]

well from the marketing perspective you could call it, tall screen.

[lenazegher]

The author dismisses the possibility of side-by-side windows on a small screen, but I no problems using multiple windows on my 1080p 15" laptop screen. Therefore i find a wider screen much more productive--it's much harder to intelligently fill a screen with a narrower aspect ratio

[bjustin]

I have a 13" Macbook Air with a reasonable 1440x900 resolution, and I can fit about 1 1/3 windows on screen, at best: a narrower-than-usual browser window and TweetBot.

Laptop screens are generally not wide enough to fit two windows side by side. Even the ones that are, such as your 1080p 15" laptop, are unusable for most of us due to tiny text and so on.

[comex]

My 15" MBP at 1400x900x2 is wide enough to fit a split editor, or an editor and part of a terminal (I find that having part of a background window visible makes it less jarring to switch to it). I wouldn't mind it being physically taller, but I wouldn't want it to be any narrower.

[bjustin]

1440x900 is just enough for me to use Sublime Text 2 in two column mode, or Xcode with the assistant editor. I do have to hide any sidebars for both to be usable.

I stand by earlier post for, say, a web browser or email client.

[icebraining]

I can fit two windows on a 1280x800 13" screen just fine. You need applications with little chrome to make it work, though.

[petsos]

I'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are windows users that are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.

[pedalpete]

I'd disagree with that based on the stereotype of windows users not caring about UI or not noticing the lack of things like smooth animations and awkward sizing.

I say that as a windows user and fan (I have a mac, but it's far from my favorite machine).

I also don't feel that mac is any better at managing two windows than Windows.

Microsoft has tried to improve the side-by-side window set-up with their hot spots, but I feel it is a fairly weak implementation, and even though they advertised the feature heavily in Windows 7, I doubt many people use it regularly.

[petsos]

I didn't mean to say that all windows users do this, or that users of other OSes don't do that, but based on my experience most of the people who work with just one maximized window are windows users.

I don't want to start an OS flamewar though, so I'm going to restate my guess as:

I'm guessing most of the wide screen "haters" are people who are used to the "one maximized app at the time" workflow.

[ladzoppelin]

I cant use an OS without the Window snap functionality of Windows 7/8. Just throw the windows into opposite corners and go. Every time I show people that feature I get a positive reaction but I guess I really have no idea how much they use it.

[snotrockets]

I suggest you try a tiling window manager, that automates the process.

[pwthornton]

Yes.

I use Windows and OS X on most days of the week, and Windows has never been that well suited for wide screen use, whereas OS X's window management makes it much easier to put screens side by side. I'm often doing this, and it's one of the biggest reasons I'm more productive on OS X. The idea that an app would take up my entire screen, unless it was something like a video editing app, is crazy to me.

A widescreen laptop monitor allows me to copy and paste data from an email into a spreadsheet for instance. Doing that on a 3:2 monitor would be maddening. I agree that for single window use, 3:2 is better for many things, but we don't really like in a single window model anymore.

[esolyt]

This is weird.

I use both Windows 7 and OSX everyday. Windows 7's window management is so much better that, it makes me realize how much time I lose managing windows on OSX. The only logical explanation I can come up is that you don't know about snapping windows on Windows 7. Dragging a window to the left or right side of the screen (or with keyboard: Win+Left/Right) will tile it to that part of the screen.

[r00fus]

Aero-snap-like utilites have existed on OSX for several years now (and bettersnaptool is free and very powerful).

I'd rather have a built-in unix shell (OSX) and install an aero-snap-alike than deal with Windows+putty+cygwin+...

[snotrockets]

One can say that he'd rather have a tiling window manager and an environment similar to the one he'll deploy in rather than dealing with various incompatible build systems and the strange mix of BSD environment presented in Mac OS X.

That is to say, all OS suck; and we should not compare dick sizes, as we would all lose.

[iyulaev]

Windows key + (left or right arrow)

Works fine in Windows, I use it all the time.

[DeepDuh]

window management is indeed better designed on windows (since 7) which makes your parent poster's claim a bit unsubstantiated, but thinking about it a little more there is something to it: Windows applications, especially since the ribbon UI pattern has emerged, are often specifically designed such that you need them to run in fullscreen. Try using office on 950px width and you know what I mean - you simply can't get to lots of control elements comfortably without the full screen width. Mac software on the other hand has always been optimized for multiple non modal panels, still carried over in the prominent info window even in consumer apps. You can place that thing wherever you want. For power users this is very good because they can position these windows as close as possible to the content they want to edit, scroll the window behind without loosing focus (still not a standard windows feature) and do a series of operations minimizing mouse movement and clicks, since a panel of similar operations as their last one stays open. This as well as the always accessible main menu is what allows users to play around width the width of windows.

If only window management and multi screen support were as good as the one on windows - it would pretty much be a perfect classic desktop environment.

[rayiner]

I think 16:10 is a great aspect ratio. In OS X on a 13" screen, it's perfect for two 80x25 emacs buffers side by side.

[shrughes]

Now extend the screen vertically until it becomes a 4:3 screen. Now you can fit two 80x30 emacs buffers side by side.

[rayiner]

But then it's a bigger screen. To maintain the same screen size, you need to extend vertically while narrowing horizontally. Now you can't fit 2 80 column buffers side by side without reducing font size. A 16:10 screen can be treated as two side-by-side 8:10 windows, or basically the same ratio as a piece of letter-sized paper. A 4:3 screen is two side-by-side 2:3 windows, which is substantially narrower than paper size.

[shrughes]

Yeah, I think there's a certain width you need to meet before growing vertically is comfortable. A 16:10 12.5" screen I have is wide enough. A 4:3 14" screen I had was barely wide enough.

Once you hit that threshold, going taller is better. And if you're going to be below that threshold anyway, going taller is better, I think.

Of course, this changes from application to application -- when I used an IDE like Visual Studio, there was no hope of putting buffers side by side, and vertical space was all that mattered.

I don't tile web browser windows, either. I'm using a 12.5" 1280x800 screen right now, and it's maximized, with the Windows taskbar on the right side. Using half the screen would be kind of pointless (I'm not reading two documents at once) and I often would like to have a taller screen when web browsing.

[snotrockets]

(author here) I find a 15" laptop to big to be useable as a laptop. My current one has a 13.3", and that's not enough to open two side-by-side documents showing 80 chars per line each, without having the fonts ridiculously small. remember that font size should be the same regardless the dpi, so having more pixels won't help if the physical size remain the same.

[petsos]

I think you are missing the point of using multiple windows. You don't need to have N number of symmetrical windows all the time. You can have e.g. a small IM window on the side and a twitter client underneath, a terminal at the bottom, etc.

Personally I even like partially overlapping windows, e.g. I can only have part of a terminal visible if I'm tailing a file, I just need to see if something comes and then I can bring it on the front.

[snotrockets]

So instead of having an aspect ratio that fits computing, you prefer to work around a movie-fitting aspect ratio.

[petsos]

Why do you say that it doesn't fit computing? Perhaps I'm not very OCD, but I don't see why you always need to see the whole window of an app to work efficiently.

But that's just me, even if you prefer tiling windows, you can have many more configurations than the split screen.

[snogglethorpe]

I like wider screens 'cause I can have multiple editor/terminal/etc windows wide-by-side... I find things usually just fit together "better" on wide-format screens than on 4:3 screens.

So yes, I believe wider screens are better. :]

[Needless to say, I also find the constant bloviating on places like HN from people that think 4:3 screens are better for dev work pretty silly...]

[taligent]

The reason wider screens are preferred is because of human's field of view. We see 180 degrees horizontally yet only 135 degrees vertically.

So why on earth would you build a screen that requires people to expend more energy to use ?

[esolyt]

While it is true that our eyes' horizontal field of view is close to 180 degrees, we can't really "see" that much at once, especially if we are talking about reading.

Watching and reading are inherently different processes.

While reading, you will actually be focused to a very limited area at once. You will constantly move your eyes as you keep reading the text, regardless of how wide the screen is. A longer line requires more eye movement to reach the end of the line and makes it easier to lose track of which line you were at.

While watching, you don't have to make out every little detail in every single frame, so it is a good idea to make the aspect ratio of movies more like the way we see real life.

In summary, a widescreen movie is able to better utilize our "wide eyes", whereas wide text not only fails to better utilize them, but it actually makes text harder to read.

[taligent]

You might have to move your eyes left/right to read.

But it sure beats having to move your head.

[beagle3]

If that were true, people would have Preferred landscape books to portrait books. They don't.

[icebraining]

Holding and flipping pages on a landscape book is harder; furthermore, books are usually smaller as a whole.

[ynniv]

When you open the book the two page spread is often landscape.

[r00fus]

Do you actually read both sides? On a textbook, magazine or encylopedia, perhaps - mainly because a physical book doesn't have search features.

On a novel, it's portrait - you need paragraphs of context as you scan forwards and backwards to follow the information stream.

On a computer with text search facilities, it's more convenient to have vertical text results and paragraphs - as long as the width is acceptable.

Of course, TVs look better in a widescreen format, and computer screens have been forced to orbit TV display sizing for the past decade... and this is why we're stuck with useless 16:9 screens with not enough vertical pixels.