

Tall and Narrow - apress
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/05/22/Portrait-Mode

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thomasgerbe
I find this better explains use cases.

<http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/ipad-scroll-or-card/>

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joebadmo
_Information Design: Card stacks create random breaks in the reading flow. The
more breaks the more you need to reorient—in other words: Think._

One thing I've found is that in a scrolling interface, I tend to neurotically
scroll constantly, keeping my actual reading visual field at the top few lines
of the scrolling area. I.e., when I can scroll, I will, constantly.

Card-based, or paginated reading interfaces, on the other hand, allow me to
relax because I know I don't have to page over until I hit the bottom of the
current page. The constant (very) low-grade anxiety is gone.

Not that that's an overwhelming argument for pagination, but it's not a point
I see addressed ever. I agree with most of the other points, e.g. lack of
indication of length or place. But they seem pretty easily addressable.

There are compromises, too, like a scrolling interface with a page down
mechanism, but I've found that they're not as satisfying as a horizontal
pagination.

Part of this might be having grown up with physical media.

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demallien
I do the same thing when using a mouse. Interestingly though, when using a
touch interface for the same page, I tend to scroll less often. This includes
when I'm using a touch pad for scrolling on a PC.

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tednaleid
I disagree with the OP. When you're actually reading newspapers, books, and
magazines, they're open and are wider than they are tall. All other media, TV,
movies, etc are also wider than tall, and tablets are not about consuming
totally static content.

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raganwald
Would folks please edit the titles to remove the blog name, author, and other
meta-text leaving only the actual post title? There are some exceptions, of
course, but I suggest that for a post like this, the title ought to be just
"Tall and Narrow." Thanks for listening!

 _Please flag and/or remove this post if the request really doesn't belong in
the discussion. Even if you agree with my request!_

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jpitz
The content of the /html/head/title element is indeed what was entered as the
posting title.

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raganwald
Yes it does, and HN suggests the title element as the default when submitting
a link. However, most blogging products add extra stuff like the name of the
blog for SEO purposes. If you look at the post itself, the title is simply
"Tall and Narrow."

HN shows you the doman (tbray.org) next to the title, so there is no need to
also have the title incude Tim's name or the name of his blog.

So my suggestion is to override the default, as we are not search engine bots.
I contend this makes the titles easier to read and parse for humans. JM2C, of
course.

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dont
The OP is ill informed.

Devices are meant to be landscape oriented because our field of vision is
landscape oriented - and it feels natural to have most of your field of view
occupied by what you're primarily engaged in.

This is the reason books are landscape oriented once opened, so are newspapers
(broadsheets both when opened and folded, tabloids when unfolded)

Also our shoulders are about 1.5-2 feet apart - so portrait orientations are
uncomfortable to hold.

Columnar rivers of text, when laid out correctly (without requiring a vertical
scroll) on a landscape oriented tablet "feel" natural -- and is the right
thing to do instead of filling empty spaces with attention stealing widgets.

Infact you can attempt similar multi-column layouts on the web, albeit with
limited success, like on most of the apple.com site and the erstwhile
International Herald Tribune iht.com site (before it got merged into the NYT
site)

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evangineer
I say it depends. For 7 to 10" tablets, the author may well be correct.

I have a 5" Dell Streak which I almost always use in landscape, especially
when reading PDFs as the display is sufficiently wide that I don't have to
scroll horizontally.

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baddox
You can hold a tablet in portrait alignment, and have a news/reader app that
gave you multiple tall narrow columns of text.

