I’ve been thinking about getting LCD arms as well, but that will have to wait until I buy my 22" LCD first - as it is, the tablet PC I’m using now has stretched my budget to the limit.
I don’t think virtual desktops are quite the same thing as actually having physical screens. There are many situations that can’t be fulfilled by just virtual desktops - dragging files around from multiple folders, for instance (I like to maximise my folder windows widthwise to see file details). Or having a video playing alongside a word processor (one of the TED conferences, for instance). Not to mention click-and-dragging text from one window to another.
Now I’m trying to find a way to display the desktop (Win+D shortcut) on one monitor without going to desktop on the other monitors as well. Any ideas?
First let me say that I’m the biggest proponent of multiple monitors that exists in the world, at least for programmers. I cannot code without two monitors anymore. To the point that I literally carry around two notebooks when I have to go out of town because I’ve grown so accustomed to the environment (it isn’t the same or even as good but is enough to get). I do think it’s really important to have two matching screens though in that I think there’s a cognitive penalty to having your brain switch gears to interpret a different resolution/quality/etc… every time you look over.
All that said I think (and have anecdotal proof) that it depends a lot on the task being performed.
I run an IT department for a Mental Health Agency. We have clinicians who have sessions with their clients, then document those sessions on the PC. They are heavy computer users because they have to document everything they do.
I did a “multi-monitor trial” with them and found that it did almost no good. Same was true of our finance department (though bigger monitors gave us a huge performance boost there). I think it has a lot to do with the complexity of the task being performed and the amount of data available from the computer to the user. Many programming tasks involve a lot of research plus there are tons of output displays and toolboxes so multiple monitors enhance the experience. For straight office workers though I find it does very little good.
@Anyone suggesting virtual desktops I mean no offense to those who suggested it but the idea that Virtual Desktops are the same thing is laughable. I’ve used Virtual Desktops since the days of OS/2 and they were nothing compared to having multiple monitors.
@Andrew T. Back in my “traveling PC set-up and repair” days I had a customer who used 6 monitors (he traded stocks) and it was a sight to see. That said, you really need more horsepower than the device you linked to can provide. Anyone wanting to go medieval monitor-wise should really look at something like the Nvidia Quadro.
I could hardly imagine a life without a second monitor anymore. In the modern multitasking world, how else would you efficiently manage Outlook, Word, Excel, 2 Browsers and several Messenger conversations? And those are just the applications that contain the reference of stuff i’m working on, not the actual applications I actually perform work with.
I’m working on Visual Studio 2005 via RDP, which means that this only works on one screen (as XP-Win2003 RDP does not support dual screens), and i’m virtually begging to get a bigger screen for that.
In the moment where you have to use 2 applications at the same time (one for reference, i.e. the Specs and one for implementation), 2 monitors already paid off, but i think that 24" is the maximum sane size for most people, as on bigger sizes you spend more time searching than finding. With 2 monitors, you have the border of those monitors as a “fix point” that makes orientation a lot easier than one too bog screen with a lot of “wasteland” between the borders that prevent you from memorizing a certain point.
I find it amazing that this issue is still being debated after all of these years. I have been using multiple monitor for the last ten years. While I usually use at least two, there have been several periods when I had 3 monitors hooked up. When I am in a situation where I am limited to one monitor I find it very restrictive and frustrating. Even with a multi monitor setup I still use virtual desktops for grouping of windows for a particular activity.
It doesn’t really matter to me if it is one screen or two as long as my available resolution is at least 2560 wide. Two small screens are usually a lot cheaper than one very large screen.
The extra resolution is invaluable for monitoring log file, server stats, viewing reference materials while working and keeping tabs on communication channels.
I guess if you are blessed with being able to dedicate 100% of your attention to a single task and don’t benefit from having your work and your reference material visible at the same time, then go ahead and stick with your limited screen real estate. As for me, I will take as much screen real estate that I can afford.
I don’t think I experience any productivity gain from having a second monitor. I do find it very much more comfortable having a second one just for email and IM, however. There may be an unperceived gain from simply being more comfortable. I do, however, find an enormous gain from having a real chair, desk, mouse, keyboard and monitor over using a laptop on a couch, at a table or at Panera.
At work I have 2x 17" LCD’s.
What makes me special is that I have my right one rotated 90 degrees.
This gives me some interesting viewing options. I do most of my work on the left (normal) monitor and use the right (rotated) monitor for viewing and reading web pages, pdf’s etc. Both monitors are at the same resolution, but having one rotated is handy to test the scalability of web sites. The screen actually resembles and A4 sheet of paper making reading lengthy sites/docs easier.
I, personally, use EVERY application in full screen. A bigger monitor gives me a ridiculously small advantage. I don’t use my “desktop” at all. Personally, I think that the whole idea of resizeable windows is a burden to productivity. I can think of almost no situation where I would want to have two different application visible at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t single task. But if I want to look at a different application, I WANT TO LOOK AT A DIFFERENT APPLICATION. It almost never does me any good having part of a different application in the background, showing part of it behind my current window. If I cared to look at it, it’s only one alt-tab press away. If I don’t, it deserves no place on my screen.
Having tried both, I seriously think people who have multiple applications visible at the same time need to re-evaluate what they are doing. Are you really using your screen space right by having windows at half size so you could look at something in the background ? Do you ever actually look at it, without at the same time shifting your entire focus (in which case you might as well press alt-tab) ? Can you look at two screens at once, or would alt-tab safe you precious time that you would otherwise use to move your head and eyes and refocus on a different screen ?
At work I have a multi-monitor setup - 2 x 19" monitors, in portrait mode to maximise the vertical space. Which I find nicer than having the monitors in landscape as you can see more of a document, source code, etc on it.
I also use a multi-desktop application, as I find it nice to be able to switch between sets of open applications, each set up for a specific task. It works quite well, I can have an environment for code editing on one desktop, be doing a code inspection on another, and working on a quick bug fix or documentation task in another.
I’ve found that this setup has increased my productivity because I tend to only have the applications for the task at hand available on the desktop.
Maybe I’m reading the data wrong, but doesn’t it say in the data that 1x24" monitor is more productive than 2x20" monitors, despite the latter having more screen real estate?
I’m not seeing how this justifies having two monitors…
But moving to a widescreen LCD is well worth it, it works well with all those IDEs like Eclipse/Aptana, and Photoshop where you can have all the little windows on the side and finally… a decent amount of space for your code.
In the spirit of ‘use what you’ve got’ I have 19" and 15" LCDs next to each other. I find that I use the big one as a front and center screen, for the window with the stuff that I’m focusing on. The smaller screen gets the peripheral-vision-monitoring stuff. Not just a messenger window with a slow conversation, but also progress dialogs that I don’t like hidden underneath my active window. In that way, a second monitor is a luxury gimmick at best, allowing for even more things to simultaneously distract me from what I’m supposed to be doing.
However, productivity really increases when working (think editorial work on technical documents full of internal references) on large documents, when I typically find myself jumping between two or three locations in the document continuously. MS Word allows multiple open windows for the same document, which ocmbined with a sufficient amount of screen space reduces scrolling by several orders of magnitude.
I used to work on a single 20" and boy did my productivity increase when I got my second 20" monitor. A lot of people say a single 30" is better than dual 20", i’d say quite the opposite. The dual monitors enables us to easily maximize windows on monitors individually (using software like Ultramon), having it on a single monitor requires us to manually resize the windows.
Two of them were good, three was probably better, but four gets too wide, and a quad setup simply isn’t usable. My current setup with two 20’s and a 30 in the center is absolutely perfect. I’ve got the 30 as my primary monitor, plenty wide for lines of code (well, almost) and the 20s are great for documents, tutorials, helper applications, remote desktop, management studio or whatever other applications one might have running.
I can never imagine going back to a single monitor. Never.
More usable desktop space reduces the amount of time you spend on window management excise. Instead of incessantly dragging, sizing, minimizing and maximizing windows, you can do actual productive work.
I believe you need 3 screens because you have to deal with the Mac window manager which is just a pain. Grabbing and resizing windows is such a hassle (need to grab de title bar or the right bottom corner and drag) you end up with getting all your windows maximized and switching from one to other with expos or meta + TAB. (Like Ms windows users but without expos).
Linux users do not have this problem (depending on their window manager). Most of linux’s WM propose you to resize or move windows by right or left cliking anywhere on them while pressing meta. This allow you to move windows almost outside your screen and makes your desktop instantly bigger then your physical screen !
You can choose to keep some windows above or below the others and can turn them into transparent to see what’s happening under your current windows. The keyboard focus can be configured to follow the mouse instead of having to click on windows. Clicking on windows has the side effect to bring them to front hidding other windows on the same screen.
Wider screens may affect productivity but I do not think multiple screens (especially 3 screens) might show a dramatic improvement in developpers productivity.
More is more indeed. Not better, though; if you’re not monitoring (sorry) the whole surface of your desktop, then having the extra surface is a waste. It would only save two Ctrl- arrow presses for me while producing distraction when anything actually happens on a side screen. The only reason I’m not going further to claim that task switching is all I need is that in its current form, it’s too sequential, and when I have more than 3 windows that I visit frequently, it feels like using reel tape instead of a disk drive.
By the way, not making explicit after your first quote that two 20" monitors ended up 5-6% less productive than a single 24" one is, well, not very gentlemanly.
“In Linux you can just have multiple virtual desktops, which I think accomplishes the same thing nicely. Too bad Windows makes you buy so many monitors to get the same effect.”
Really? You can read one spreadsheet while entering data in another with virtual desktops? No? Guess they’re not the same then…
The key here is being able to SEE various windows while working on whatever you’re doing.
Also, there are third party tools to get virtual desktops in windows…
Something related: Will they ever change the way “Show desktop” aka Windows-Key + D works? At the moment, it simply minimizes everything, and when you hit it again, it does an undo on that. If you, however, hit Windows+D in order to, well, actually DO something on the desktop, like opening a file, launching an application, whatever gives you a new window, you cannot undo the “Show desktop” anymore.
Wouldn’t it make more sense if it would bring the desktop into the foreground in the z-order, and after hitting again, back into the background?
is that I have my right one rotated 90 degrees.
The system I got at work is my 15#8243; laptop screen. ^^