The Apple thread

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Misfit
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Misfit »

Firefox wrote:
piku wrote:Questions: 30" monitors... why*...
Wha...? Just imagine how much source code you could fit on a screen that size! :o
I subscribe to the fit as much code on the screen as possible school of thought too.

However it took me a long time to get used to a 24" widescreen and still pretty much find myself putting a lot of stuff in the middle of it. I think a 30" screen would just need too much head movement...
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Dio »

I've sat in front of one of the Dell 30's and it is just impossible to credit how large it is. You feel slightly worried you might be the B-feature in the Meaning Of Life.

I don't think more than a 24 is really necessary...
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Re: The Apple thread

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It's like fast computers, you get used to 30" screens really quickly and end up hating anything smaller. I've had one for a good 3 years now
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Misfit »

gravy wrote:It's like fast computers, you get used to 30" screens really quickly and end up hating anything smaller. I've had one for a good 3 years now
I think dual monitors is more use to me than one big one. I thought having one large widescreen would replace my two 17" screen setup. I was wrong. I now have a 24" widescreen and a 19" 4:3 next to each other, but I could probably get away with two 19" 4:3 screens really.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Rod_S »

gravy wrote:It's like fast computers, you get used to 30" screens really quickly and end up hating anything smaller. I've had one for a good 3 years now
This. Even a 24" display feels pokey to me after owning a 30" Cinema display for 6 months. You do get used to things incredibly quickly. It's amazing to use, your entire field of view is filled with pixels - Photoshop is a dream on this display, and especially makes sense with the highly configurable UI in CS3.
Misfit wrote: However it took me a long time to get used to a 24" widescreen and still pretty much find myself putting a lot of stuff in the middle of it. I think a 30" screen would just need too much head movement...
You can just move your eyes, man.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Jimaroid »

Anyone who thinks 30" is too big or unecessary doesn't belong in this thread.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Dio »

Rod_S wrote:You can just move your eyes, man.
Some people can't, I'm one of 'em ;).

Because of the strength of the lenses in my glasses, there's quite a lot of chromatic aberration, so I have substantially worse vision the further I get off the centre axis of the lens. It's not 'bad', but for reading text comfortably I much prefer to look pretty much straight at it. On this 24" I'd certainly be moving my head to read text if it was the whole width of the monitor.

Don't get me wrong, if someone was offering me one for the same price I got this thing I'd bite their arm off, but I'm not going to pay £600 for one :D.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by pogo »

Dio wrote:I don't think more than a 24 is really necessary...
I do. My main display is 24", but attached to the DVI port of my iMac is a 20". I make good use of both. The 20" has Mail, iTunes, Safari's Downloads window and iPulse. The 24" has whatever I am looking at or working on, often two or three different things. I would certainly accept and use a 30" if offered one, as it's a similar amount of screen space.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by kalmar »

I do suspect Apple make intentionally poor use of screen acreage to stimulate sales of their gigantic monitors. I have a 17" iMac and things get very cluttered, very quickly, and it's not helped by the fact that you just can't get a fresh screen to work in for each major application, like you can in Windows (you know, the background window thing).

I always end up spending ages clicking minimise on things to get back to the one window I want, I'm actually just as productive on my old laptop with Windows 98 and an 800x600 13" monitor, which is stupid.

It's the one thing that irks me most about it at the moment. I'm wondering if the "spaces" thing of Leopard solves it.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by pogo »

kalmar wrote:I do suspect Apple make intentionally poor use of screen acreage to stimulate sales of their gigantic monitors. I have a 17" iMac and things get very cluttered, very quickly, and it's not helped by the fact that you just can't get a fresh screen to work in for each major application, like you can in Windows (you know, the background window thing).
Yes, but that's one of Windows worst features. The grey space between and around document windows is just wasted - if it were at least transparent you could make use of it. Even worse it's severely broken when dealing with multiple displays, especially ones not the same size - you cannot make use of all your screen space. At least some apps like Office, IE, Windows Explorer work the same way as the Mac, but many are still very broken.
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Re: The Apple thread

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kalmar wrote:I do suspect Apple make intentionally poor use of screen acreage to stimulate sales of their gigantic monitors. I have a 17" iMac and things get very cluttered, very quickly, and it's not helped by the fact that you just can't get a fresh screen to work in for each major application, like you can in Windows (you know, the background window thing).

I always end up spending ages clicking minimise on things to get back to the one window I want, I'm actually just as productive on my old laptop with Windows 98 and an 800x600 13" monitor, which is stupid.

It's the one thing that irks me most about it at the moment. I'm wondering if the "spaces" thing of Leopard solves it.
Most apps have a hide all other apps keybaord short cut. That works pretty well for decluttering the screen in most cases
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Re: The Apple thread

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pogo wrote:I do. My main display is 24", but attached to the DVI port of my iMac is a 20". I make good use of both. The 20" has Mail, iTunes, Safari's Downloads window and iPulse. The 24" has whatever I am looking at or working on, often two or three different things. I would certainly accept and use a 30" if offered one, as it's a similar amount of screen space.
It's just gravy though. I do something similar - my laptop's screen has email and anything else 'long term' with the big monitor as the main work screen, but I can't say I'd drastically miss it if it wasn't there.
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Re: The Apple thread

Post by Rod_S »

kalmar wrote:I
I always end up spending ages clicking minimise on things to get back to the one window I want.
Command-option-click on the Dock icon of the app you want to give focus to. Boom.
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Re: The Apple thread

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kalmar wrote:I do suspect Apple make intentionally poor use of screen acreage to stimulate sales of their gigantic monitors. I have a 17" iMac and things get very cluttered, very quickly, and it's not helped by the fact that you just can't get a fresh screen to work in for each major application, like you can in Windows (you know, the background window thing).

I always end up spending ages clicking minimise on things to get back to the one window I want, I'm actually just as productive on my old laptop with Windows 98 and an 800x600 13" monitor, which is stupid.

It's the one thing that irks me most about it at the moment. I'm wondering if the "spaces" thing of Leopard solves it.
Hide others - cmd-option-h
Exposé - F10 or 11 by default I think.
Not sure what the exposé bindings for "this application's windows" is, but I have it mapped to opt-button3, with "Expose all" on standard button 3, and "Desktop" on opt-cmd-button3

I generally work with between 15 and 20 apps open at once (46 open windows on my desktop right now), and although I do hide a few of them by default, the majority are open at all times- I've found it's vastly faster to use exposé than any other method, including virtual desktops. This holds true on both the 1.4Ghz mini and the 400Mhz TiBook. I love Exposé.

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Re: The Apple thread

Post by kalmar »

Yeah, that's it. cmd-opt-h and cmd-opt-click the icon do the same thing, which seems to be what I'm after.
Why didn't I know this before? :roll:

The thing is, there's only 4 "actions" shown in the Expose control panel - All windows, Application windows, Desktop and Dashboard. I do use All Windows and Desktop, when I remember which F-key it's on, but that hide trick (and I assume there's others) isn't one of them.
RTFM I guess.
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