You’d have trouble buying a TV these days that wasn’t widescreen (16:9) ratio, but when it comes to consuming entertainment on smaller devices like tablets, standard aspect (4:3) still predominates. Does that need to change? More »
Foxtel launched a bunch of new channels over the weekend, but it’s always something of a crap shoot when you switch channels as to whether you’ll get a widescreen or 4:3 image. TV Tonight has a handy list of which channels are currently offered in widescreen format. More »
The bigger-is-better attitude is rarely debated when discussing monitor sizes, but not everyone is in love with the trend towards widescreen monitors. What if all that width is largely wasted? Rafe Needleman, a contributor at the gadget blog Crave, has this to say about wide-screen monitors:
Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line). What happens with modern “stretchy” sites or apps that let the user read text in a widescreen format where line lengths get long? Pages get tiring or hard to read.
He goes on to note that many arguments supporting widescreen monitors are based on the benefit of putting two applications side by side on the same monitor, but that most monitors have a fairly small number of vertical pixels and that it’s a poor compromise. Certainly the number of tips we’ve shared on how to make your widescreen more functional—making Google reader widescreen and how to micromanage your widescreen, to name a few—shows that widescreen monitors definitely require a little tweaking and adaptation to hit their productivity stride. But are widescreen monitors really as unproductive as Needleman suggests? Sound off in the comments below about your unholy love for or deep frustration with your widescreen monitor. Photo by Timothy J. The Myth of Width: When Wide Screens Don’t Work [Crave]
Dennis O’Reilly says he saved himself some dough by working out ways to work in Microsoft Office apps in full screen mode, rather than shelling out for a wide screen monitor. His post runs through ways to tweak the display in Office 2003, as well as the more limited options available in Office 2007.
By default, full screen view in Office 2003 doesn’t give you menus or toolbars, but here’s how to get them:
access standard menus (like File or Edit) in full-screen mode by pressing F10 or Alt, then pressing the underlined letters to access that menu’s options or simply moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen. get access to more menus by right clicking Close Full Screen and choosing one from the pop-up menu. Press Alt to toggle between the standard toolbar and the one you chose. You can create a customised toolbar by right clicking a toolbar and choosing Customize > Toolbars > New. Name it, select a template (choosing Normal.dot makes it available to all documents), and click OK. Fill your new toolbar by clicking the Commands tab, then select an entry in the Categories window, and drag your chosen command to the toolbar. Hit Close to finish.Full screen options in 2007 are strangely more limited than in 2003. There’s a Full Screen Reading view (which you can’t edit) or there’s the Full Screen Mode, which lacks the toolbar options from 2003- all you can do is can view standard formatting options by right-clicking anywhere in the document. Does the Mac-clone Ribbon make up for this? If you’ve got any tips for maximising your screen real estate in Office, please share in comments.
Broaden your view in Word, Excel, other Office apps [CNET] More »
Techie Jeff Atwood says that while having lots of screen real estate to display more information is great, the downside to multiple or widescreen monitors is that they make you work a little harder to manage windows:
