I play guitar, watch USMLR and NHL, occasionally brew beer, enjoy live music and travel, and practice sarcasm.

Mastodon - @baronvonj@mas.to
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  • 5 Posts
  • 92 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ve run ChromeOS Flex on an old Surface Pro 3 and it was pretty good. However Flex doesn’t support the Linux containers or Android apps. I was tempted to try Fedora on it, but ended up trading it in as that battery wasn’t that reliable anymore. I think the Surface line is best option in the 2-in-1 space anymore. When I was looking at options last fall no other vendor really had anything under 13", which is just ridiculous to ever use as s tablet.











  • 😂 I mean I think I can infer two things from this post. It has a pretty strongly positive score lending me to believe tens of other people find it irritating too. Basically everyone who has actually responded to me have never used any apps in landscape mode on a tablet (at least not any that isn’t fundamentally a video player that forces landscape) and are borderline apoplectic to hear that other people who actually like like fit-to-width display options in applications that display primarily text.

    I will say this, at least Liftoff actually let’s me scroll the content from those dead spaces on the side. There was one app where even that didn’t work.


  • I’d be fine with a multi-column UI. Like maybe a collapsible feed view, with the post/comment filling the screen when the feed view is collapsed. I understand the usefulness of negative space. But Liftoff looks like the developer just forgot that tablets exist and set an arbitrary limit that is reasonable on phones. Holding my phone in front of my tablet with both in landscape, it’s maybe a half centimeter wider on either side on the tablet vs the phone.


  • Well, literally every other application on my tablet utilizes the available space. There could be a collapsible feed view on the left and a collapsible community sidebar view on the right. When I hit reply button, it could open up the comment editor on either side. Or maybe I could pin the post on the left and scroll the comments on the right (or vice-versa). The arbitrary width limit is also forcing images to be smaller than they need to be. And clicking on the images.will just show them in the size they already could have been shown online if the view was fitted to the screen width.

    At the end of the day, I paid for a device with a large screen because it can comfortably display more content. The device and the OS support landscape orientation, and technically so does Liftoff. But if the developer feels strongly that users should stick to portrait mode, then they can simply disable landscape mode altogether so it doesn’t redraw itself when I physically rotate the device from one to the other. Otherwise, they should have options to use the extra screen width in landscape mode.



  • Why were those iPhone users holding the phone in whatever way was comfortable to them instead of limiting what part of the physically touchable chasis that happened to also be part of the antenna?

    I’ll hold the device in whatever manner and orientation is most comfortable for me at the time. And want the apps I use to least have the option to utilize the screen fully.



  • Yes, I think there should at least be an option for it to use the full width. When holding the tablet with hands on either side, it’s really obnoxious (and even physically painful sometimes, depending on inflammation) when every UI element to interact with is wedged into the middle with half the screen space unused, forcing you to stretch out you hands for your thumbs to reach.