Liam Proven
Tall, once dark, black-clad atheist skeptic SF fan; writes (mostly about computers) for a living.
Grizzled internet veteran. Online since 1985. Current primary email is from 1991. Butlerian Jihadi since 1993.
All opinions expressed are my own & not those of any employer.
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Scrollbars, toolbars, docks, app switchers, app launchers. Use the width.
Unless there is a functional reason, make controls vertical.
MS’s 21st century design shows it’s lost the plot.
Example #1: the Office Ribbon is an example of a broken design, because it can’t be moved to vertical. The old toolbars could. They didn’t know how to use their own product’s older versions.
(LibreOffice’s ribbon can be vertical. It works fine that way.)
Example #2: Now, Win11’s taskbar has been updated so it can be vertical again, showing the developers didn’t know how to use the old tool. So the copy is a poor, half-broken one.
Counter-example: I used GNUstep’s NeXT-style vertical menu bars. They don’t work very well IMHO.
Acorn’s RISC OS ones work superbly.
NeXT borrowed the Dock idea from RISC OS, & did it better. But for menus, they did it worse, IMHO.
@kakafarm Computers do do that, yes.