LG Introduces Monitor With 21:9 Aspect Ratio 311
skade88 writes "LG has released an ultra wide monitor. It really is wide (WxHxD: 699.7 X 387 X 208.5 mm) — take a look at the thing! It looks like it would be good for movies shot in larger aspect ratios such as 2.20 for 70mm film or 2.39 for modern cinemascope films. But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors."
WTFGA (Score:5, Funny)
great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!
And they might find it in their heart to put the number pad back on to average laptops again instead of reserving them for the hideously overpriced (and hard to justify to management) ones...
Re:WTFGA (Score:4, Funny)
Won't be long before laptops look like ironing boards.
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Won't be long before laptops look like ironing boards.
Hmm. If we make them buoyant and waterproof they can double as a surfboard. Too bad Apple owns rounded corners. ;-)
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Won't be long before laptops look like ironing boards.
Hmm. If we make them buoyant and waterproof they can double as a surfboard. Too bad Apple owns rounded corners. ;-)
Yeah, that's the thing I hate about modern handheld appliances. Anything not made by Apple has those sharp corners.
Re:WTFGA (Score:4, Informative)
great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!
Toshiba's had one for a few weeks (at least)
http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/satellite/U840W/U845W-S410/ [toshiba.com]
DISPLAY RESOLUTION
1792x768 (HD+), 21:9 aspect ratio, Supports 720p content
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In the future, monitors will just be a thin ribbon of pixels. :D
Hey buddy we have a really great 70" x 5" screen, but forget about that technical mumbo jumbo, it's 70 inches wide! Perfect for the living room!
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You realize that you can't have a diagonal less than your larger dimension, right?
(70^2+5^2)^.5=70.1 inch diameter.
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Yeah, shouldn't have tried to do sqrt(4925) in my head :)
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Yeah, but 70" by 5" is in marketing inches. By the time you subtract the bezel and parts that don't actually display an image, it's a 65" by 0.25" screen.
Re:WTFGA (Score:4, Informative)
I thought that LCD screens don't count the bezel as part of the screen size. CRT monitors did, because the actual tube stretched beyond the display portion.
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great. just waiting for laptops to follow this format as they inevitably will. then we'll be able to read up to 3 lines of text at a time!
Good thing three lines is also three paragraphs! Sorry coders.
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I think that's already underway. Many cameras are moving in that direction, I am not sure you could still buy a 4:3 monitor any more.
That aspect ratio may have been around since the ancient Greeks, but it's quickly going away.
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4:3 is getting harder to get in anything larger then the 19". I am a Controls Engineer and our visualization software that we use does not convert well to different ratios so if we were to change from a 4:3 ratio, we would have to do some redraws on every screen, or just stretch it on the screen so the text appears too wide.
We have been going up in monitor size and 2 years ago, we could get 4:3 in things larger then 19" and standardized on buying 21" and were going to standardize on 23". Suddenly, I can't
Re:WTFGA (Score:4, Informative)
That's 5:4 aspect ratio.
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Even better IMO. A move in the right, rather than wrong, direction.
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What is a normal sized TV?
Assuming the cost between what you think is normal and what is widely available why bother?
Personally I am hoping those 80" 4k beasts come down in price quickly.
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Re:WTFGA (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the 90s there was a race to keep making TVs bigger and bigger (and smaller and smaller) which has led to the elimination of the normal sized TV
You're not very old, are you? There is no such thing as a "normal sized" TV and never was. TVs have always been as big as it was economical to make them. When I was a kid in the '50s, a "normal" TV was a nineteen inch black and white. Later it was twenty five inch color. Then thirty. Then thirty five. Then forty. TVs have always been getting bigger and bigger.
As to aspect ratio, old movies were 4:3 but went to widescreen some time when I was young. Partly it was because you couldn't make a widescreen CRT; in fact, the earliest color set I saw had a tube that was almost round (the rich neighbor's). Mostly it was because the movie industry thought TV would kill the industry, and made the aspect ratio incompatible.
Now that CRTs are quaint things there's no reason for TVs to be 4:3 any more.
However, cinimascope for a TV is retarded. There are so many aspect ratios in movies that no matter what your TV's aspect ratio, you're going to have black bars either at the top and bottom, or the sides. I can picture this thing in my living room, and it looks really, really stupid there.
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my tablet is 4:3. 2048*1536. Or 3:4, depending on I hold it.
GUI designers (Score:5, Funny)
But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waste line of our monitors.
Yeah. My hope is that Windows 9 will offer some way to divide the screen into multiple views so that more than one document/application can be shown at once. Not just little tiles that zoom up to full-screen applications. Kind of like little, virtual screens that you could open to provide access to your content, like a doorway.
They could call them "Doors."
I'm surprised that nobody has come up with this already.
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aero tiles?
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I didn't know about the windows key + arrows for the docking positions for documents. I just always docked things manually to one side or the other. With 2 monitors, I could not dock to the middle positions.
Thanks for the post with that info. Cool new trick!
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My Windows 7 install (yrch) does this just fine...
Most useful for Snap (Score:2)
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Or just multiple windows. I can get 3 emacs windows side by side on mine, but I have to hide the terminals behind them with a slight gap so I can click them. If even wider I could just put a couple terminals to the side vertically.
I am a big confused about the article's comment that OS GUI designs would need to catch up to this. There is nothing the OS or GUI needs to do here.
Compare to a dual monitor (Score:5, Insightful)
side by side
...provided you had eyes on the side of your head, like e.g. a chamaeleon, of course.
Do only chameleons benefit from a dual monitor? The 7:3 form factor offers some of the benefits of a side-by-side dual monitor setup without the annoying pair of bezels down the middle.
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Programming (Score:2)
Just think -- how many source files you can have side-by-side on this baby :)
Many programmers already use two monitors side-by-side in a multi-head configuration, so I don't see why this would be any different.
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For work I think I'd prefer the two monitors tbh, as you can angle them both towards yourself.
This looks like it's so wide that it would be preferable for it to curve around slightly like an imax cinema so that all parts of the display are facing you directly.
Now that, I would buy. It would be perfect for gaming as well as work and movies.
Arrgh! Where's my 16:10 (Score:5, Insightful)
You can find them, but they're expensive and harder and harder to find.
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I think you mean 8:5.
What the hell is up with aspect ratios not being properly reduced?
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3.2:2?
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8:5 you mean. Stupid people existing is no reason to not properly reduce a ratio/fraction.
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Proper reducing is only done to whole numbers.
When you get to 5th grade you will find out about that.
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ASUS has good 16:10's at a reasonable price.
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=73621&vpn=PA248Q&manufacture=ASUS&promoid=1306 [ncix.com]
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I have an Asus ProArt PA246Q which is the predecessor of the linked monitor, and I've been nothing but thrilled with it.
Mine is very much designed for color accuracy and graphics work; the bezel even has ruler marks along the edges of the screen.
No issues playing games or video, and the color capability is outstanding.
I purposefully bought this monitor for the color accuracy and the aspect ratio,,
1920x1200.. It was a perfect replacement for my 21" 4:3 montior as the screen is the same height, just wider tha
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I got a 24" Dell IPS recently. It's 16:10, I couldn't be happier with it.
Some cinephile will just want a Cinemascope ratio (Score:2)
Where does it end, people?!?!?
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And they'd be angry that very few films are shot that way. This 21:9 monitor is a waste of time and space.
OT: Splitting physical displays in Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
The concept of an ultra-wide monitor makes me think of one of the frustration I have with increasingly large displays and window arrangement.
It's all well and good to have a huge display or several of them at high resolutions, but it's super annoying to layout windows in a way that lets you see multiple application windows on the screen at the same time. I have two 1600xwhatever displays, but there are times where it would seem more beneficial to have three 1024x768 displays for application window management, even though it would be marginally lower total resolution.
It would be nice to be able to split a display, especially wide screen displays, into virtual monitors so that arranging app windows would be easier. I've found some utilities that seem able to remember window positions, but that assumes I always want the same layout (almost never) and they almost always suffer from the usual glitchyness.
Is there anything that does this?
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I dunno man, I just snap applications to either side of the monitor in KDE. It seems to work well.
Doesn't Windows do this? I thought that's what aero-snap was.
--
BMO
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Windows can do it with two screens, but not with the mouse (the mouse gesture to dock to the side of the monitor is to drag and drop the window against the edge of the desktop area, you can't dock to the edge of the monitors where they touch).
To get the docking effect with two screens, you have to use the Windows + left/right arrow key, which will dock the current window to the left or right side of whatever monitor its on. Repeatedly pressing it will cycle through the monitors, as well.
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Pre-Win7:
CTRL+Click on the tasks in taskbar, Right click, Tile horizontally/vertically
Win7:
WIN+Left/Right (and to a lesser extent: up and down)
WIN+SHIFT+Left/Right (for multimonitor cases)
Also, AMD has Hydragrid, which was pretty decent, last time I checked. But in Win7, I find it largely superfluous.
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Winsplit Revolution [winsplit-revolution.com] is pretty good for this and free. The default settings are ctrl-alt-numpad key moves the window to that section of the display (so 7 would move it to the top left taking up 1/6th of the screen). Hitting the same combo again gives the top left but going 2/3 of the way horizontal, again gives 1/3. The other number pad keys work similarly and the arrow keys move the current window between monitors. I think there's combos for maximizing and minimizing as well.
1366x768? Only if she's 11" (Score:5, Funny)
I like big monitors and I cannot lie
No other brother can deny
When a display walks in with an itty bitty bezel
and a 21:9 aspect ratio I get sprung
Rotate 90 Degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
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xrandr to rotate screen (nvidia/linux)
Fuck this wide shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Wide screens? More like SHORT screens! That's how they sell you a smaller screen with the same "inches" (hypotenuse instead of area). You have to get a very large monitor if you want a decent amount of vertical space.
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Agreed. Trying to find a monitor these days that's 1280 tall or greater can be challenging. (Without turning the monitor sideways, but then it's too skinny.) It seems like everyone thinks you only use your PC to watch movies.
I don't think I've ever watched a movie on my PC. A trailer, maybe.
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Trying to find a monitor these days that's 1280 tall or greater can be challenging.
Actually, 27" monitors at WQHD (2560x1440) seem to be catching on in South Korea, so you can find them easily on eBay for less than $400. Very tempting. But it's still as I said, you have to buy a huge monitor to get some vertical space.
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Trying to find a monitor these days that's 1280 tall or greater can be challenging.
Actually, 27" monitors at WQHD (2560x1440) seem to be catching on in South Korea, so you can find them easily on eBay for less than $400. Very tempting. But it's still as I said, you have to buy a huge monitor to get some vertical space.
I wouldn't be opposed to that, if they were color-accurate enough for serious Photoshop work. I'm certainly not against more resolution per se, but merely adding more horizontal doesn't buy much.
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I wouldn't be opposed to that, if they were color-accurate enough for serious Photoshop work.
They're usually S-IPS LEDs, so probably yes. I heard they're pretty much the same stuff that big brands use, but sometimes from imperfect yields, such as a dead pixel here and there (some ads claim "perfect pixel", so they will check that this is not the case).
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Fortunately, the PC consumer market is gradually being replaced by the tablet consumer market. Eventually, the only people using desktop PCs will be professionals and enthusiasts, who typically won't even consider using the 1080p crap.
That would be fine. And as soon as Adobe releases real versions of photoshop and lightroom for tablets, (instead of the toy apps they have now) I'll dump the PC and never look back. But until then, I'm locked in.
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That would be fine. And as soon as Adobe releases real versions of photoshop and lightroom for tablets, (instead of the toy apps they have now) I'll dump the PC and never look back. But until then, I'm locked in.
I think you missed the previous poster's point. He's saying that as casual users drop away to tablets/smartphones, a larger portion of desktop users will be the kind of people who use apps like Photoshop and Lightroom – and these people are going to be more likely to demand good monitors des
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What's funny, is that it has the same 2560 pixel horizontal resolution as the Apple Cinema Display, with only 1080 pixels vertically, where the Apple has 1440. They are the same price.
Apple is selling a display with 25% more pixels for the same price, and in an aspect ratio that's good for EDITING movies, rather than watching them. Well done, LG!
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Note: most MSRP on the Cinema Display is $999, but it doesn't take a lot of effort to find it for the $799 that the above post states.
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The article lists the price as $699.
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Wait until a flexible LCD is created - then you'll get tape monitors (6.3mm tall and 20m wide, wound on a reel).
Is this a 'real' aspect ratio? (Score:2)
Is this a real pixel aspect ratio, or a stupid artifact and trickery?
I've seen "widescreen" monitors that take a 4:3 aspect ratio pixel count into a widescreen monitor (*cough* Dell *cough*).
It's maybe useful for people who want to use their computer to watch movies, but as an actual computer monitor it was a complete joke. A circle drawn on screen was an oval, text was wide and flat. It was 'widescreen' only in the imaginations of marketing.
Any time I look at a widescreen monitor now, I check the specs,
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Well, that's easy to calculate given the specifications listed in the article.
21/9 = 2.33
2560/1080 = 2.37
They're not perfectly square pixels, but close to it.
English, please? (Score:2)
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Mod up...
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No, I think they were being purposeful. This product is a complete waste.
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Waste is what the RSS feed had in it. I'm just readin what they sendin.
699.7 X 387 X 208.5 mm? (Score:2)
Square monitors are best in a sense (Score:2)
s - b - c - d - h
e - 1 - 3 - 2 - y
g - 7 - 5 - 9 - a
o - 8 - 4 - 6 - k
r - n - z - u - w
Look at the central digit - 5, and try to determine the outer digits whilst staying focused on the "5". It gets progressively harder the further out you go.
Now consider a widescreen monitor, and apply what we've learnt to that. Detail will resolve horizontally just fine, but vertically, there's a jarring loss of relative '
Similar to dual 4:3 monitors (Score:2, Insightful)
This wouldn't be so bad in a large enough screen size. A single 21:9 would be closer to the dual 4:3 monitor setup I used to have (at home and at work)... which gave me 8:3 ( 24:9 )
I do not like the dual 16:9 setup I have at work now; it is ridiculously wide with very little vertical height. A single large 21:9 monitor would be much more useful than the 32:9 I get from dual 16:9 monitors. There is a lot of useless real estate with a dual 16:9 setup.
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FWIW, some of my team members have a 16:9 and 4:3 setup, the 4:3 is handy for terminal sessions.
Me, I manage somehow with all that sidespace. All this so everything can become an HDTV. Or is it that they can make screens wider for substantially less effort and incremental cost than both taller and wider?
Why an issue for GUI designers. (Score:2)
Ok I can see when they went from 4:3 to 16:9, it created some issues, as a lot of software had that aspect ratio more or less fixed in. But in an age of screens with different resolutions, and resizable Windows is the new aspect ratio that big of a deal? I don't think so. Most new design is less about pixel location from top left but from the different spots. For the most part information is left aligned, right aligned, or centered. Data elements with more data than most screens can hold are often width
Reminds me of a decades old sketch. (Score:5, Funny)
In a German comedy show (back in the 70s or early 80s) they presented an "ultra-wide-cimema-maxi-super-scope or something" format, where they presented a 100m dash run "in it's entirety" on screen from start to finish without panning or zooming. It was like about a 160:9 ratio. They apologized for the "slight black bars at the bottom and top" when presented on the 4:3 TV sets. Which was basically completely black with 2-3 scan lines lit in the middle.
Golden Ratio (Score:2)
Please use Golden Ratio.
This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.
16:10
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This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.
Because it has some intrinsic property that makes it so, or because everyone just believes that to be true?
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This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.
Because it has some intrinsic property that makes it so, or because everyone just believes that to be true?
Given how prevalent it is in nature and human culture, there is probably a little of both. The wikipedia article on the Golden Ratio [wikipedia.org] notes several diverse places where it's appeared through history and nature. It is frequently associated with beauty and harmony, and there seems to be some indication that it correlates well with what we consider beautiful when looking at people.
Pertinent to your question, the Wikipedia page does note that there seems to be some disagreement on whether we do indeed have a pr
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This is the best ratio, it is natural and beautiful.
Because it has some intrinsic property that makes it so, or because everyone just believes that to be true?
Yes
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the intrinsic property is its definition a+b:a = a:b
that is harmonic for the same reason a sound is harmonic as opposed to white noise: the brain recognizes a pattern and gives itself a pat on the shoulder.
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that is harmonic for the same reason a sound is harmonic
If it was for the same reason as sound we'd all be most pleased by ratios of 2:1 or 3:2 (35mm photographs), wouldn't we? I don't see how the two sides of a rectangle, for example, can interfere with each other in the way sound waves can, producing a new waveform, which is what our ears pick up on - not a "pattern" per se.
Problem? (Score:3)
Widescreen is good for TVs, not for monitors (Score:3)
But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors.
Or, alternatively, manufacturers and retailers need to stop trying to pass off tunerless TV sets as monitors.
A wide aspect ratio is great for HDTV and feature films. But when you're trying to get work done on the desktop, 4:3 is still superior to the alternatives. Actually, for web browsing and word processing, a 16:9 monitor turned 90 degrees might work fairly well – but this is poorly supported with existing operating systems and it would break Windows ClearType, which is needed to get halfway decent looking text on today's low-DPI displays.
This LG monitor isn't that terrible – it has a resolution of 2560x1080, which means you aren't losing any more vertical space than you would with a standard 1080p monitor. But 1080 vertical lines is about the minimum that is even somewhat acceptable. What frightens me is the prospect that we're going to wind up with 1792x768 or some such abomination becoming the standard on laptops. For some reason, vendors really seem to love those short-screen 768p displays, even though they don't match HDTV resolutions or any other known standard.
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I want 1920x1440 (Score:2)
1920x1440, at about 27", would play HD video without scaling, with vertical space left over, and give me vertical space for coding, page layout, etc. And it'd be 4:3.
Great (Score:2)
incorrect assumption (Score:2)
"But OS GUI designs need to catch up to the ever horizontally expanding waistline of our monitors."
Or manufacturers could stop assuming that the only thing we want to do with our computers is sit and watch movies.
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Re:Waste Line (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the line of space wasted by having mostly empty tool bars and docks stretching across the bottom or top of the screen.
It's why when I get stuck with a 16:9 monitor I dock everything to the left side.
Re:Waste Line (Score:5, Informative)
anandtech wasn't particularly pleased with the monitor, either. [anandtech.com]
Superwide + can't rotate 90 degrees + poor refresh rate? you bet.
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anandtech wasn't particularly pleased with the monitor, either. [anandtech.com]
Superwide + can't rotate 90 degrees + poor refresh rate? you bet.
Also, the resolution is 2560x1080. My cellphone has more pixels than that (at least in the vertical direction).
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Don't forget low resolution... standard 16:9 27" monitors have the same horizontal resolution and hundreds of pixels more vertically...
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Still sucks menus of LTR or RTL text - these tend to work best with options stacked, not next to each other...
However, for users of TTB languages... This may change the interface a bit...
Hmm.. training to read the normal LTR test sideways? It'd be an interesting role reversal.
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Re:Waste Line (Score:5, Informative)
It's the line of space wasted by having mostly empty tool bars and docks stretching across the bottom or top of the screen.
It's why when I get stuck with a 16:9 monitor I dock everything to the left side.
The wasted space is bad, but comparing monitors becomes bad too. A 21:9 monitor which is 29" has a lot less area than a 29" monitor at 16:9 which in turn has a lot less area than a 29" monitor at 4:3. A marketer's wet dream probably, but terrible for the consumer.
This 22:9 monitor which is 29" is about 11" high in usable area. My 21" 16:9 monitor at work is about 10.3" high in usable area.
A 22:9 monitor at 29" only has the area of a 26.5" monitor at 16:9 or a 24.8" monitor at 4:3.
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Sure, just use:
xterm -geometry 200
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Yep. that's why my work setup is 3x 1280x1024 monitors, lots of screen space with little waste.
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Wide format isn't showign me white space. It's showing me the scroll bar to make me scroll on every page. Forbid the devs could let me tab to the Submit button, or focus the next field, or even bother to focus at all. Web design in our intranet apps is abysmal. They build every page at least 1500 tall.
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Its news only because people feel strongly about their preferred aspect ratio. The 21:9 aspect ratio is the story, not the physical monitor. I stubbornly cling to 16:10 for example and dislike the continual shrinking of the available vertical space. If they'd scale up past 1080 I might be able to get into a wider screen as it'd allow two decently sized tiled windows on one monitor. That is not the trend though and I hope that this particular aspect ratio does not catch on.
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All of our menu bars, status displays, ribbons, etc*, are horizontal bars on the top or bottom of their respective areas.
Apparently, you've never used AfterStep/WindowMaker, etc., where all the desktop widgets go on the right or left. They've been around since before you could get widescreen displays.
Personally, I'm thinking of adding a second column of widgets and swallowed apps on my right-side dock.