LeeMobile

I just bought a second LCD monitor for my home computer.

It quickly dawned on me that I didn’t necessarily need another monitor, but in this scenario, more is always more.  Once you’ve gone dual screen, it’s hard to go back.

My older monitor, a 22 inch Dell, seemed to display colours quite nicely, and appeared to be a pretty wicked monitor.  But now, beside my brand new 24 inch Samsung, it’s definitely showing its age.  I guess it’s been a year or two since I’ve noticed the new slew of monitors out, but they’re way brighter and the colour is much more vibrant and accurate.

Anyhow, to answer my first nagging question of necessity.  No, I could live without a second screen… but productivity is increased with more pixel real estate.  Especially as a programmer, it really helps to minimize repetitive tasks like switching between windows.  Now with two screens, I can have my editor up on one screen, and some reference material on another.  Ah… it makes coding less painful.

It also makes sense that the more real estate you have, the more efficient you’ll work for most computer related tasks.  There’s less time spent managing windows and finding what you want.  A recent study from the University of Utah drew the conclusion that productivity could be increased by up to 50% with the right screen real estate.  After a certain threshold, productivity actually drops (most likely due to the fact that with too much space you end up spending time seeking to find what you want).

The two monitors for some reason make it feel really good to work on the computer.  I’ve been nagging my boss at work to get me a second one, and I think I’ll get one soon

–

Speaking of efficiencies.  I should mention some really handy tools that have made me more efficient.  They’re not programming tools, but just general tools that everyone should give a try:

•  Slickrun: Slickrun is a little tool that allows you to open up programs by typing in a custom word.  That way you can map your commonly used programs to words that you know, so that you don’t have to hunt around the start menu or the desktop to launch a program.

  For example, I have the word “mp3″ mapped to Winamp, my mp3 player.  I just have to hit Alt-Q, type in mp3, and then hit enter and bam!  Winamp is launched.  Launching programs this way is way faster and more intuitive.  Rather than remembering where the icon is on my desktop/start menu, grabbing the mouse, and hunting around, I can just punch it into my keyboard without having to lift my hands.

• Virtual Dimensions: It’s a multiple desktop tool for windows.  Basically, it allows you to swap between “desktops”.  Most Linux desktops have this feature, but Windows is severly lacking in this department.  Virtual Dimensions is the best multi-desktop app for Windows that I’ve tried, and I’ve tried quite a few of them.  Again, the efficiency in it is that I rely more on the keyboard to swap between desktops instead of hunting windows with the mouse.  I usually stick my internet browsers on one desktop, an editor on another, and my music app on a third… all while switching between them with hotkeys.
• Finally, I recommend Winsplit Revolution for those with fairly large screens.  I noticed with my new 24 inch monitor that a lot of space is wasted when surfing or editing text.  The monitor is so wide that I could in fact open up two browsers side-by-side, and the browsers could still be usable.  With Winsplit, you can resize and move windows to fit exactly one half (or quarter, or third) of the screen.

Check them out!  You’ll thank me later if you do.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.