Most common screen sizes

I am working on the next release of Check Writer and this time, I will depart from the “serious” kind of old fashion accounting product look to go into Wysiwyg so users can move fields around with the mouse, add pictures, and altogether get great displays or mess up as they see fit.

My issue is which screen sizes I should support.

The window where people will design their check is life size on a 1920 x 1080 screen. That translates to 876 x 372. On a 1280 x 720 screen it makes a big window but is still acceptable.

My issue is the antiquated 800 x 600 screens. Such window will not fit horizontally. The program is still usable, but it is not very elegant.

How many computers would you believe still use that resolution ?

I wonder if it is worth the pain to spend weeks adapting the app to that resolution for old configurations that may never buy new programs anyway.

According to Wikipedia, 800x600 is just 0.64 of users in 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution

I am inclined not to bother. What do you think ?

Do not fix something to screen sizes… even with Retina Displays and/or resolutions beyond FullHD most of the users use windows smaller than this. Speaking for myself my only one Fullscreen App is VMware with a virtualized Desktop. All other windows are more or less stacked with window sizes where I am still able to drag and drop someting from or to the Desktop.

I tend to build mine at 1024 x 768 as the min size/un maximised and collapsible controls if I can just in case… but mines a completely different kind of application, I can get away with quite a lot, usually there’s a picture control that can fill any dead space
Most of the people I cater for are in the 3D modelling/rendering world so they all have huge monitors

At Strasbourg Auchan (France), a worker in the computer area told me lately (last month) that 1368 x 768 is the standard PC screen !

(I discovered that unless the resolution in pixels is displayed, the laptop screen size can be 10" to 19" (if any), the real resolution is always 1368 x 768…) Weird.

To reprhase your question, I would ask: How old you think your user’s computer can be ?

iBooks in early 2000x had a 1024 * 700 (700 ?)… No, you’d better get an eye there iBook; the screen resolution started from 800 x 600 until…

My experience has been that 1024 x 768 is not an unreasonable expectation for my customers. I haven’t seen any monitors that can’t support that resolution in a long time.

Thank you all. I think I will go for the 876 x 372 check then.

For OSX I usually fit it to a 13" Mac laptop…

http://netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=17

Ouch. Talking about fragmentation :frowning:

Looks like that is showing mobile, consoles and desktop sizes.

It is … to see a specific desktop OS you need a subscription.

[quote=140430:@Robert Schofield]Looks like that is showing mobile, consoles and desktop sizes.

It is … to see a specific desktop OS you need a subscription.[/quote]

It is true that Android is a parangon of fragmentation. 1366x756 is the Android tablets most common resolution, and apparently 1920 x 1080 is the most common on desktop.

For the moment I should be fine with an 876 pixels which shows on the 21" screen 1920x1080 at exactly 8.5 ".

What would be the most common resolution for it ?

If it is 1280 x 768 that is fine, but at 1980 x 1080, 13" will make my window awfully small. It would go from 8.5" down to 5.27"…

I guess I could manage different layouts, or some method that would proportionally size and place controls according to screen.AvailableWidth, but am just trying to avoid it :wink:

I design to an 800x600 layout with the option to scale up. At 1280x768, a preset of 125% looks good. Or the user can drag a corner of the screen to whatever size they want. This is desktop, of course. Mobile would require a completely different layout and user interaction - button/tap instead of a keyboard-centric design.

Mobile will come in due time. There are enough specific issues to it so usually it is not possible to simply adapt a Desktop UI anyway.