2006 04 25
High DPI screen
Recently I’ve been working with high resolution monitor – 17″ WUXGA resolution. That’s 1920×1200, no less.
Of course, fonts are too little to see with standard Windows settings (small fonts, 96 dpi). Large fonts (120 dpi) are also too little, so I am using 160 dpi now.
Most Windows applications are good enough for such large fonts, with or without little tweaking, except that graphics don’t get larger and usually are too small. Best applications are, unsurprisingly, Office 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. Their menu graphics scale proportionally with fonts.
Worst application is, unsurprisingly again, Internet Explorer. A big part of the fault is web site designers’, though. Pixel-based designs are common, and Internet Explorer cannot zoom not only images, but text too. The result is non-browsable Web. At least, of what use is DELFI.lt with its content in 1/4 screen width and indecipherable menus? Or Lietuvos rytas, CNN, even BBC News in their unreadable tiny text, even with largest fonts set?
Firefox comes in handy. It cannot zoom images, but at least I can read now. But several sites rendering is too bad–text often goes out of table boundaries, and Firefox toolbar icons are way too small (and they call them Large in menu customization dialog). And entire interface seems driven larger by fonts only–every line seems tight-fitted around text, which looks inelegant.
Opera wins. It zooms page with images, and when it zooms, it also zooms pixel-sized tables, thus making my sites more readable (i.e., more than two words in a line). And text stays inside tables. I can also zoom its interface icons, though it is not automatically done as in Office. These guys must have done it right when they designed Opera version for small screen devices. The only two issues which I noticed are too little line heights in dowload transfer status and maybe too little tab close icons (I have reported the bug). Firefox guys could learn a lot from Opera. The only thing for which I missed configuration option is which next tab is selected after closing a tab (I like Firefox select-right-one style).
Most of the sites on the Internet don’t look the same with high DPI settings. From the sites I usually visit, I could mention Omni.lt as looking exactly the same (except the graphics), also, Digg, Slashdot and LWN.
Designers, forget about pixel designs. They’re completely unusable. There were much sites which I visited and they had very narrow columns (many WordPress themes are such, and my previous theme was one of them). You should even make images sizeable together with text. Dive into Accessibility is a good start. Strangely, accessibility is not only for disabled people any longer, but for people with high-end technologies.
Paskelbė SilvereX (22:09) kategorijoje english
9 komentarai (-ų)
Nors su laiku, spaudžiant rūpesčiams ir problemoms, nebegalvoji ir užmiršti tai… bet kaip gera tada būna prisimint ir žinot, kad dabar ne vien tavo kasdieninės problemos gyvenime būna, bet yra ir daug gerų dalykų… tik tokius vis pamirštam… o be reikalo 
