Posting using a laptop - techiques for seeing more USEFUL stuff!

John_Gray

For my sins, when away from work or home I have to use a laptop with an almost microscopic 1280 x 800 screen. This means that the whole top half-to-two-thirds of the screen is filled with irrelevant Stuff before I start scrolling down, the deep green banner, Post New Thread, Important - this Forum isn't moderated, and so on and so forth.

It would be a Good Idea if people with screens with few vertical pixels could have a mechanism for not displaying the irrelevant Stuff - but until this idea is taken up (hah!), what techniques do people have for maximising the useful display area on their screens when in the MSE Techie Forum?

busenbust

If using Firefox, Adblock Plus works wonders.

fermi

busenbust wrote: »

If using Firefox, Adblock Plus works wonders.

Especially with the Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper. You can use that to hide most of the MSE masthead.

Using a compact FF theme and an extension that will auto-hide the menu-bar also helps.

Doing all that, I get something like this:

John_Gray

Thank you - but that rather proves my point! You have removed one of the rather less necessary elements, admittedly the largest, but what about all the remaining stuff above the post, most of which is only looked at very occasionally and whose information is largely redundant or pointless? That presumably would require more work in AdBlock (which, incidentally, I have but haven't made any alterations to). Less than half your screen is full of Useful Post Data.

Perhaps the only solution is to get a laptop with double the vertical number of pixels, so that the 'fixed' area above a post occupies less than half of the available vertical space...

But it would be nice if one of the board techies could take up this problem as a general issue - I don't know how you would arrange this...!

almillar

I presume you know how to zoom in Firefox, or most other browsers? I don't know how far you can customise AdBlock, but you might be able to go further than has been described above. This is the problem with widescreen displays, worse laptops, even worse netbooks! After resolution has been going up on computers for years, with laptops coming along, it's gone back down a bit, and with netbooks it's horrible.
I don't necessarily think that hi-res viewers should suffer for low-res viewers.
I've got a Mac laptop and the first thing I do is move the dock from the bottom to the side - I've got screen space to spare at the sides, but none vertically. This way at least my browser has the whole screen top-to-bottom. In Windows you can move the taskbar to the sides to give yourself more space too. Especially in Windows7, where programmes are represented only by their icons instead of icons and words like XP (a bit dock-like?!!), having the taskbar up the side makes more sense than it used to.

kwikbreaks

F11 is your friend too. It won't get rid of website furniture but it removes browser toolbars etc. and they take up significant space on lower res screens (which are the only sort I ever use anyway). F11 a second time restores the stuff it hid.

fermi

John_Gray wrote: »

Thank you - but that rather proves my point! You have removed one of the rather less necessary elements, admittedly the largest, but what about all the remaining stuff above the post, most of which is only looked at very occasionally and whose information is largely redundant or pointless? That presumably would require more work in AdBlock (which, incidentally, I have but haven't made any alterations to). Less than half your screen is full of Useful Post Data.

Can be hidden as well if you really feel the need.

But as you say, a method to hide it built into the forum would be nice.

Other forum elements have show/hide buttons.

If they could be applied to the content above the main posting part of the board, and that option made to persist until you decide to show them again, then that would be ideal.

John_Gray

So I can rely on you to put this forward to the Powers That Be, then?! (Thanks in advance...)

And, yes, I knew of the F11 mechanism - highly useful and worth stressing in this circumstance, too.

zzzLazyDaisy

John_Gray wrote: »

And, yes, I knew of the F11 mechanism - highly useful and worth stressing in this circumstance, too.

I didn't know about this, just tried it and it has made a big difference to my netbook display. Thanks! :j

fermi

John_Gray wrote: »

So I can rely on you to put this forward to the Powers That Be, then?! (Thanks in advance...)

I suppose I can try, but don't "hold your breath".

I've kept asking for months the forum search to be fixed so that it always updates properly with recent posts, but so far no luck.

fermi

Right. Posted this on the feedback board...

Viewing the forums on a laptop screen.

I'll try to make sure the techie team are aware of it, but can't do anything more than that I'm afraid.