Screen space
I recently read Edward Tufte’s book Visual Explanations which I thoroughly enjoyed. I think I may go through it again, take notes, and post them. Given the visual nature of the book, that would hardly do it justice, but oh well.
One thing that he pointed out is that computer interfaces often squeeze the content in navigation, tools and borders. As thought I’d see how much space I was actually using and if I could increase it.
Let’s see what Firefox looks like:
The status bar is 30 pixels high. The top section is 115 pixels. Crunch the numbers [1] and you’ll find that Google is taking up only 81% of my screen. Of course, the information presented (such as the title, status information and url) is helpful, but let’s see if I can make better usage of my screen real estate:
By using small icons and removing the web developer tool bar (which I dearly love), I’ve increased the space that web pages use to 86% [2]. I’ve also removed a couple of the buttons that I don’t use and added the little gear button, which makes the web developer tool bar visible for those times I’m using it.
[1] My screen resolution is 1024×768 = 786,432 pixels. The status bar is 30 pixels high, running the full length of the screen, and the top bar is 115 pixels. So, (1024 x (30 + 115)) / 786,432 = 0.81
[2] I still have the status bar, but this time the top bar is 80 pixels high. Substitute 80 in for 115 in [1] and you get about 0.86