[PLUG] screen width

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri Jun 11 02:24:57 UTC 2010


On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 06:01:58PM -0700, m0gely wrote:
> I just don't get reasoning. I have a hi-res display as well, like you, 
> but widescreen at 1920x1200. I can easily read two 8.5x11 documents on 
> my screen, side by side, with the menu at the top. It's all very legible 
> to someone like you and me who appreciate the pixels.

When you get older, you will hopefully "get reasoning".  

I will explain it again, slowly.  Many of us - vital to the economy
that keep you alive - are older than you, or were born with worse 
vision.  Visual acuity drops with age. 

Yes, YOU can easily read two 8.5x11 documents, side by side, with
room to spare on the side.  However, if you give me a buck for 
everyone on your city block who can't, because they are not blessed
with your young and good eyes, I will have enough for dinner at a
fine restaurant. 

Imagine (again this involves thinking about the needs of other
people, something some programmers or young people do not understand)
that you cannot SEE individual pixels on a 1920x1200 screen, because
they are too small.  Text becomes lines of grey.  Try reading your
screen from two times further away than normal (if you are under 30)
or three times further away (if you are under 20).  That is how
it looks to a 60 year old.  Measure with a tape measure, please,
at 3x normal distance most laptop screens look like postcards.

Imagine that the emergency room doctor trying to save your life
cannot see vital information on a screen they are reading.  The
doctor made the silly mistake of getting old (after spending a 
long time in school and residency and gaining experience).  Some
very important people necessary to your personal survival do not
have your visual acuity.

Or imagine you design a screen of tiny text for public consumption.
And then you personally get stripped of assets in an Americans With
Disabilities Act lawsuit.  Right now today, many programmers are
designing displays in violation of that law, and sometimes it catches
up with them.

A general rule of thumb is that the needed point size increases
linearly with age.  Retina cells die, eye lenses cloud and 
become rigid and less focusable.  For a presentation on a 1024x768
computer projector,  Guy Kawasaki teaches us to divide the age of
the oldest important person in the room by two, and that is the
minimum effective font size.  60 years old?  Minimum 30 point. 
I never use less than 40 for text I expect to be seen. 
My presentations work.

Yes, I can put 20 xterms on my screen, with fonts that even you
would need a magnifying glass to see.  My pixels are tiny, so I
devote a bunch of them to each character.  Fewer jaggies makes
text more readable.  Some really bad code is written with hardwired
small fonts, though.  Such programmers should be legally restrained
from getting closer than 100 feet to a computer.

And for those of us that are old enough to have learned arithmetic
in school, we can actually do the numbers and learn that there are
a lot of useless pixels on the side of your two vertically scrunched
pages on your runt screen.  I included those numbers in the message
you are responding to, but apparently they went right over your head. 
Two pages fit on my 4:3 screen also.  What good are the extra pixels
to the side of your two pages?  

Do you spend lots of time watching movies and playing games?  If
so, I can see the attraction of a wider screen.  However, while
you are wasting time, some of us are working hard to keep things
running and people like you alive.  When you make it too hard for
us, perhaps we will stop diverting resources towards your survival.

Think about others as distinct individuals, not clones of yourself. 
Besides being the right thing to do, it makes you more employable,
because the code you write will be usable by more people than yourself.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



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