blackest_k's Journal: are some of our Gui's fundamentally wrong.

Are our gui's badly designed?
There are two fundamental orientations landscape and portrait. Landscape works very well for pictures and portrait very well for text. I don't think many people will disagree with that. now look at your computer screen it is landscape ideal for viewing pictures but not so good for viewing text.

Portrait orientation works very well for text, but our gui's are not making the most of our vertical space in fact they squeeze the vertical space even smaller with title bars, toolbars and menu bars. at the same time the width of the screen tends to be under utilised.

It's hard to visualise how much better a portrait orientated page is without trying it.

http://personalcomputing.portrait.com/us/products/pp_tbyb.html

allows you to download a trial version of pivotpro which allows you to reorientate your screen. However it is not a good solution since most crt's do not like working on thier side.

A better method would be to move as much as possible from the top to the sides
(most ide's have dockable toolbars) It may be something only linux could do to allow moveable menu's as well.

I know a lot of developers read slashdot so how about it can you put more flexabilty into our gui's or are we going to be stuck forever with a gui which inhibits reading of text.