I’m a proud member of the dual monitor club.
Actually I was forced in to this club, but that’s another story.
And it’s so much better than one BIG screen.
Believe me, BIG displays are becoming a reality and a BIG problem, display prices are getting lower while their area is increasing.
It’s no longer monetary viable to buy 17’’ or 15’’ monitors as they are almost the same price as a 20’’ one and soon a 30’’ will be about the same price, and so on.
The problem with big monitors is mostly the way you are used to work and how Operating Systems Interfaces are designed.
You usually work with a window at a time, most probably the window is maximized.
With a big monitor this means lots, really lots, of free space and in non fixed layouts buttons far apart, basically you will get lost in all that space and you productivity will decrease.
It’s easy to get lost even if there is no free space, try reading a 300 char line and you will see what I mean!
There are tools to solve this problem by trying to emulate dual monitor setups, but it’s no quite the same.
On the other hand a dual monitor setup are much cleaner, you have space, but not too much, and mostly you can arrange them so you have a central point of attention and an auxiliary area, much like a site where you have the main content and a site bar.
You can concentrate on your work, your window at the main screen while having auxiliary windows, as an email client, IM, whatever on the side monitor.
UI designers must start thinking about this or soon it will be a BIG problem!
They already think of a solution many years ago, it just haven’t reached the big main stream audience.
It’s called: Tiling window manager
cheers
Hi Pedro,
Welcome here!
You are correct, but as I said it’s not quite the same thing!
It’s better to solve this with a new UI paradigm than hopping the users start using a specific window manager.
A problem with bigger displays is that while it may seem like more space to the user, it really isn’t any more space than that of a small display. So a windows manager will not help give more pixels so that the physical space can be used more effectively. The user has to turn their head to see each side of the screen on a 30″ monitor. Yet they gain nothing in actual screen real estate.
The only real answer is dual, quad… setups. Where each monitor is a reasonable size and their resolution capable of something that gives high value screen real estate. That way the user doesn’t just get something presented to them BIGGER, but MORE can be shown to the user. I see monitor screens coming out that have 2, 4, 6… individual LCD screens built into one monitor casing. So it looks like a 30″ single monitor, but has a resolution of a 2×2 array of monitors.