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Comment by logbiscuitswave | Hacker News Reader

> It seems as if the people in the design team are all working exclusively on 32-inch Apple XDR Pro Displays.

Makes me think of the complaints in video game text over the past few years and how it had become so small as to be nearly unreadable on normal TVs at normal viewing distances. The natural assumption here is that the game devs were doing all their work inches away from large fancy monitors not thinking of the so-called 10’ experience most people use to consume the content.

At least many console games now have text size sliders (with varying levels of usefulness).

https://kotaku.com/the-year-in-tiny-video-game-text-2019-184...

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The majority of these are better explained as "PC game ported to console". The same problem has long existed in reverse, console game ported to PC with enormous UI.

There are a vanishingly small number of games that actually do this properly - a scalable UI that has some good default assumption for the platform it is currently on. Of course games rarely make significantly more money because the text is perfectly sized vs the 1,000 other things that are competing to get done before the release date.

Nah. Console exclusives have had this problem for a while too. It was really dreadful on 360 where some devs assumed everybody played on HDTVs despite the console supposed to be SD friendly as well. Some text was literally unreadable in Mass Effect on my 20" CRT TV at ANY distance and was just barely readable on the 20" 480p LCD I was able to upgrade to a little later.

I played the 360 version of Braid on standard definition, and much of the text was unreadable.

I think there are lots of "porting" artifacts.

Like the "attract" screen when playing on a console which previews the game in a loop. (guess it came from arcade games, or maybe like DVD menu screens)

No need for that with a PC game - you're launching it manually, why add a "click to continue"?

I am amazed by those reaaaaallly wide displays - developers in the 1990's might have predicted 16:9, but 32:9??

Size of UI text in general is an issue IMO, especially since it's often hard to configure. Sometimes I just want slightly larger text. Why can't I just set that in Firefox? I need to use some userChrome CSS hack (which, of course, breaks some UI elements), and for other applications it's even harder (I tried looking it up for GIMP and couldn't find an easy solution, but I didn't spend a very long time on it).

Recently I've been playing Baldur's Gate (the Enhanced Edition), and while it does allow resizing the text size it becomes so large that it doesn't fit in many UI elements (most notable, the dialog box). I guess it's better than nothing, but with just a very small amount of effort it could have been much better.

Say about the web what you will, but the ability to resize almost any text is a great feature.

Also I think Windows actually manages all of this much better, where you can just set a text size in settings (I think? It's been years since I used Windows, so not sure).

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