Design Renaissance
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I think my kids broke my laptop. I guess that’s one of the risks associated with having children. I mean, I never really expected my possessions to remain unscathed. But this one hurt.
Anyways, in the absence of my “real” laptop, I’m currently writing this on an old Thinkpad 240 that I scrounged off eBay a while ago. It packs a whopping 300MHz Celeron, maxes out at 192MB of RAM, and has a not so bright 10″, 800×600 screen.
Last night I happened to browse over to my (unfinished) website, and, for the first time — probably ever — I was slightly glad that I’d designed it to work with a horizontal resolution of 800 pixels. (I think I was being slightly stubborn at the time.)
And that got me thinking.
As I ponder the purchase of an Asus EEE, the Everex Cloudbook (comes out on Friday!), a Nokia N810 — or just sticking with my N770 — and as a bunch of people have already jumped onto the retro-resolution bandwagon, will there be a renaissance towards designs that fit on small screens?
Incidentally, I was saddened to find that the otherwise relatively low-requirement design I’ve chosen for this blog does not jive with 800×600.
Also, while using this laptop I actually had a chance to use the alternate “basic HTML” version of GMail, which was much nicer to my ~100MHz CPU (on battery). In fact, I almost like it better.
My pet peeve is fixed-width resolutions… Kyle has a nice big 22″ widescreen, and I play with 30″ LCDs in Apple stores more than is healthy. A lot of websites look so pathetic when they’re viewed on a big monitor. Of course, they should degrade to smaller sites, too.
The real accomplishment is that you found a laptop that old with a battery that still works. I have a machine that’s >1 GHz and the battery’s completely shot.
You could install Xubuntu for lightweight XFCE, and then just display everything remotely (X11 forwarding… ideally through ssh, although I’m not sure how ssh works at 100 MHz?). Heck, you might do it with an Xubuntu live CD?
I have to say, that Cloudbook looks pretty spiffy.