the way modern interfaces are designed hurts my eyes.
my eyes simply are not capable of comfortably looking at text on a screen the way most software expects us to. the text takes up too little space on the screen that i already have positioned a relatively large distance from my eyes - two feet - as to not overwhelm my senses with a wide screen.
as current screen scaling solutions are generally a non-starter, my original solution for a long time has been to run my monitor at a lower resolution - usually 1024x768, for multiple reasons. however, this is not without caveats, nearly all of which caused by the negligence of interface designers simply not concerned with the needs of those in my situation.
in the two-hundred third decade, many applications are not
designed with lower display resolutions in mind. often you'll find
applications with minimum window sizes larger than or at your monitor's
current resolution. most of the time, for no reason other than some
programmer's whim. (obviously, the minimum size of the window being
larger than the display resolution is such a vanishingly thin
corner-case that we can simply ignore it.)
many applications theoretically support lower display resolutions, but
with sometimes significantly reduced quality of life. that is to say,
applications designed by people who don't care about how the interface
scales down.
this is what creates the paradoxical interfaces that are too small at
high resolution, yet too large at low resolution.
for example: youtube's thumbnails can scale up to almost five hundred
pixels wide. this becomes very immediately and obviously apparent when
you either tile your browser window to one side of your display, or are
using a resolution thinner than what they "expected" you to use.
this is an interface design that functions simultaneously well and
poorly at high resolution - the thumbnails are large and visible,
letting you make out their fine details, yet they don't use this
on-the-fly scaling to make the text (that being, the most
important part of the fucking interface) bigger - and even worse at
low resolution, as the large thumbnails become utterly overbearing.
nothing can compare to sheer incomprehensibility of the x window
system's scaling system, however. in general, software scaling methods
are a fool's errand - it just isn't feasible to construct a consistent
method of scaling the galaxy of graphical software that exists in a way
that is better than merely lowering your display resolution.
i haven't yet seen another global scaling system get it so wrong,
though, that lowering your display resolution makes the application
smaller as compensation.
because, clearly, it makes sense to reduce the size of the font being
rendered when going from 96 dots-per-inch to 64 dots-per-inch, instead
of keeping it constant and letting the element get larger like any
sane interface should.
and, really, that's the climax of user interfaces that weren't designed with lower resolutions in mind. of interfaces so negligent of their disabled users that those with a working solution can get fucked and told they should get a new monitor by people who don't care about their struggles, because they see only benefits from the current state of the art.
good night. unless you're an interface designer.
~ 2025 / march / 17, 10:48 PM