> companies build screens with more code friendly aspect ratios
I hear this complaint a lot and I think it's based on a flawed premise.
Taller aspects might be better on very small screens that only fill tiny portions of your vision but on bigger screens -- the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer -- you want wider not taller. It's the only way to usefully use your field of view. This is why wider aspects exist.
On my 16:9 aspect 27" desktop screen, my vision is practically filled in the vertical direction -- it is easier to glance to the horizontal edges than the vertical ones. I would use more horizontal space before I used more vertical.
And this is the point of wider aspects -- they use your eyes better. If you buy three screens for your desktop, you don't stack them vertically -- you arrange them horizontally so you can actually see them.
People who keep asking for squarer displays for work should simply get bigger displays and stop pretending that a 13" laptop display is ever a good choice for a working display.
Frankly, anything sub 24" is not a working environment. Anything smaller is either (a) something you use occasionally when you're not at your desk or (b) for people who are not working.
> the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer
Could you go into more detail on this? I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous. Basically, if there's some kind of ergonomics concern I'm prepared to change, but not otherwise.
> wider aspects -- they use your eyes better
Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.
> Seems false, otherwise letters would be typed in landscape. There are other things in my FOV and that's a good thing.
It's true that in reading, we're only good at scanning approximately 8-10 words per line. This is why letters are the width that they are. But I'm not talking about making a single document fill the width of the screen. That document behavior is a relic of a small-screened world.
Modern computer working environments (particularly programming) generally involve opening a few different documents simultaneously and having them open side-by-side. Multiple editors, browser windows, debug tools, documentation, file-trees, etc. This all needs to go somewhere. It is easier to place these separate documents side-by-side than stacked vertically.
> I've been using 12 and 13" screens regularly for my day job for years, and I find the extra physical area of larger screens rather arduous.
Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window but if you've ever wanted to edit two documents side-by-side there's little you can do on a screen that small. You're pigeonholing yourself into a mono-tasking environment because you don't have the real-estate to present multiple documents simultaneously.
> Maybe you've only ever opened documents fullscreen or your work involves little more than punching brief commands into a terminal window
No, neither of these things are the case. I'm currently working with Xcode, Blender, terminals and a debug app, as well as my internet distractions, and it's not slow. I do make heavy use of virtual desktops and cmd-tab, and when I was working on a dual-screen workstation I found that most of my work centred on a single screen because I would rather move the app than scan the screen. For me at any rate, a large spatial organisation is visual clutter, and lends itself to hunting for information, whereas the apparent bottleneck of cmd-tab actually sorts information efficiently.
I'm not sure if this is making sense, I'm going down with a cold and focus has gone out of the window in quite a different sense today, but there's my 2c.
May be true for desktops, but if you have ever tried to code on a 1366x768 14" laptop display, you'll agree.
8:5/16:10 or even 3:2 fill the horizontal field of view well while also delivering more vertical space.
Even if 16:9 is theoretically better, why shouldn't we have a choice? Every notebook computer out there besides Apple has a 16:9 display, and I'm sick of it, and many others are as well. At least offer us more than one choice.
I use Visual Studio on a 1360x768 display all the time, and it's not so bad. It does encourage writing the code better because you can't read large chunks at once.
I heard a story where one famous computer scientist (Dijkstra, McCarthy, Hoare, or Knuth?) said something about how using punch cards encourages writing code better because the compile/debug loop is so long and annoying.
I hear this complaint a lot and I think it's based on a flawed premise.
Taller aspects might be better on very small screens that only fill tiny portions of your vision but on bigger screens -- the sort you should be using if you're working regularly on a computer -- you want wider not taller. It's the only way to usefully use your field of view. This is why wider aspects exist.
On my 16:9 aspect 27" desktop screen, my vision is practically filled in the vertical direction -- it is easier to glance to the horizontal edges than the vertical ones. I would use more horizontal space before I used more vertical.
And this is the point of wider aspects -- they use your eyes better. If you buy three screens for your desktop, you don't stack them vertically -- you arrange them horizontally so you can actually see them.
People who keep asking for squarer displays for work should simply get bigger displays and stop pretending that a 13" laptop display is ever a good choice for a working display.
Frankly, anything sub 24" is not a working environment. Anything smaller is either (a) something you use occasionally when you're not at your desk or (b) for people who are not working.