About 200 million PCs now run Windows 7 and these users know or should soon find out that the Win-arrow key combinations make application window handling a breeze.
Windows Key Combination
Cycle through Window Sizes
Windows-left arrow, Windows-right arrow
Fill half screen left, original size, fill half screen right
Windows-up arrow, Windows-down arrow
Fill whole screen, original size, minimized
In a apparently frivolous previous post I suggested that since many Windows 7 machines like mine were being used with full HD 1920×1080 screens the practice of fitting two application windows side-by-side would become very popular. This is certainly true in my case and has saved me the purchase of another monitor even though that is not a major expense these days.
So usually I have two browser windows open side-by-side which means the web page size is 960×1080. Web pages viewed at the maximised width of 1920 are generally very, very hard to read. A great deal of space on my real desktop is saved however.
Enter new Twitter. As many others have noted the new wider format creates havoc with carefully crafted personalised Twitter backgrounds. My 960×1080 web page sizes suffer horribly with only about 12 pixels to play with on the left.
Of course to their detriment most web page designs assume a wider page than 960 pixels but that should be no problem if floating columns are used. Sadly this is rarely the case and people like me, in the ten of millions I suspect, have to suffer the pain of horizontal scrolling. Christina Warren from Mashable gives good advice on how to customise your new Twitter background and shows off the various browser extensions like Firesizer, ResizeMe and Window Resizer that allow you to see your Twitter pages at various resolutions. It is sad to see 920×1080 is not one of the standard resolutions but at least you can customise your own sizes.
I have a job ahead of me to fit a meaningful Twitter background into a width of 12 pixels. Vertical text here we come!
