As seen in the screenshot, there's a lot of wasted space in landscape mode on my tablet. I don't see this issue in the feed. I've only noticed it when viewing it editing posts and comments.
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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"Wasted space"? To be filled with what? Providing a comfortable reading experience is paramount, not filling space. From a UI perspective I'm not sure that there is a sensible alternative.
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.
Having my eyes have the jump back and forth between two columns doesn't seem like a great user experience imo
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i'd find it much better as it's more information dense. that's why apps have preferences.
but i was just pointing out that there's definitely a "sensible alternative"
Fair enough 👍 My main point was really about basic typographic principles, and that (empty) space is fine and often preferable in UI design
i think it depends
i mean it looks shitty on my screenshot, but that's because it's a phone not a tablet. my eyes can move easier than my thumbs, so i'd rather glance than have to scroll twice as far
i disagree with empty space usually, but i don't disagree that it would be better filled with, say actionable buttons rather than text that needs to be read
This may surprise you, but I think fitting the UI to the width of the screen is a more comfortable reading experience than squishing it into some arbitrary percentage that I don't have control over. Give users the choice to decide what they prefer is all I want.
If you want wide text cool, but There are studies about how our eyes work when scanning text and that anything beyond 80 characters per line is more challenging. There is a reason type isn't set that way, and why we don't have books that are two feet wide. This isn't just some artbitrary stuff that designers make up.
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.