Working with Dual Screens

Believe it or not, I’ve somehow managed to get by never working on two displays at once though all these years. Lately, I’ve had friends tell me they’ve made the switch to dual screens and said they would never go back. I never could quite grasp the appeal for working with two screens at once. I’ve always thought it would be more trouble than it’s worth. Well, today I had my first true experience working with dual screens. And although the jury is still out on this way of working for me, I’ve found it cumbersome at times and promising at other times. But ultimately it just made me think more about the whole working setup.

What always comes to mind for me when I see people working with dual screens is, why not just get a one larger display that’s the equivalent of the two? Sure, there’s the argument that you could get two small small screens for the price of one. Although, I don’t know if that’s really the driving reason for many to choose to work with dual screens. I believe it becomes more of a psychological way of working. It’s about having physical boundaries within your working environment. The common trend for working with two screens is to devote one as your working canvas or output and the other for all your tools and palettes. Having the two screens makes it easy to create this kind of separation where as a single screen makes it next to impossible to create aside from spatial placement. While I don’t doubt this helps many in the way the work, I initially found this to be somewhat disorienting and another level of window management I had to contend with.

You see, when working with two screens, I found it difficult to keep track of which application I was in and what window actually had focus across the two screens. Another challenge is menu access across the two screens. At least this is the case in Mac OS X Tiger. I have heard from some of my “switcher” friends that they’re not too fond of how Apple handles working with multiple screens and miss this the way Windows does it. Their main beef seems to be the fact that the application menus don’t extend to the second display. The application window and its main menu can’t be dragged to the other screen. This underscores the fundamental difference in how the Mac OS and Windows OS handle windows and application menus. Since System 1.0, Apple has applied the user experience principle of keeping the access to frequented menus to a fixed location at the top of the screen. Although, there is no proof or facts to back this up, I think Microsoft chose to do the exact opposite of what the Mac did. As it seems the case with so many other aspects of the user experience (e.g. the [original] Recycle Bin placement and the Minimize, Maximize, Close button locations). So they decided to attach their application menus to the windows themselves. This decision flies in the face of user experience principles since the menu can then ultimately live anywhere on the screen. Incidentally, OS X’s Dock suffers from this problem as well. (See Tog’s Top Nine Reasons the Apple Dock Still Sucks for more on this.)

So no, I don’t have an answer to this. I respect Apple’s decision for why they handle dual screens like they do but I also see why users want to push entire applications to another window. My only suggestion is for application developers to start thinking more about dual screen use. I know Photoshop CS2 handles working in dual screens much better than previous versions. But it’s still not doing everything dual-screen users are clamoring for. I wouldn’t say that developers should go out and deliberately break Apple Human Interface Guidelines but I do see room where they could bend them or work around them. Hell, with Apple’s whole Aqua/Brushed Metal/Uniform theme mixup, I think Apple isn’t really in a good position to throw stones about this.

Is working on two screens better than one? You may think so. Again, I can’t really say just yet. What’s funny though is I just pulled out an old Mac SE/30 I bought years ago on eBay for $25 for my daughter to play around with. It reminded me of the days I used to lay out entire brochures in QuarkXPress and draw artwork in Freehand on a Mac much like this one. So why would I ever need two screens when I seemed to get along fine with just one 9″ screen back in ‘88.

3 Comments

Noah Guyot on February 14th, 2006

Back in ‘88 they didn’t have a 15″ display’s worth of palettes

Dual Monitors Increase Productivity by up to 30% at Creative Toolbox on April 20th, 2006

[...] Dual Monitors Increase Productivity by up to 30%. I just recently started working with dual screens and I have to say, it’s growing on me. Am I more productive though? I’m not sure. (Via digg toplinks.) [...]

Feb200613

George

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