Finding myself advocating for dual monitors again

I can’t imagine working on just one monitor. So much so that EVERYONE at our company has two monitors at a minimum. It is just that important. So here is an email chain I just sent with names removed. First the question:

—–Original Message—–
From:
Sent: Friday, August 03, 2007 9:08 PM
To: Schipul, Edward G.
Subject: monitors

Hey- can you send me any info on the study that showed people are happier with two monitors than one? I’m trying to decide whether to get all the designers one 20″ monitor, or two smaller ones– so when I heard what you said I was intrigued….

and my reply with links was:

My old blog post on the topic of dual monitors and visualization:
http://eschipul.com/2006/04/lateral-adjacency-virtues-of-a-second-screen/

and here is an NY Times article about it
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/20/technology/20basics.html?ex=1303185600&en=6fc17b9bf54c62ef&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

And here is one from lifehacker:
http://lifehacker.com/software/dual-monitor/dual-monitors-increase-productivity-168488.php

Your Macbook is already dual monitor capable. Just plug that second monitor in!

Thanks,

Ed

In practice we all use dual 19s or larger. I just switched to dual wide screens with an aspect ratio of 1680 x 1050 each. Love it.

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Scratch Visual Programming Language

Just was reminded about Scratch, a visual programming language helpful to teach programming.

          Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your
        own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share
        your creations on the web.
   

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills.
      As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical
      and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process
      of design.

Scratch is available free of charge, go to Download.

Download scratch here.

Flickr Images Highlighted in Yahoo Search

  Thomas Hawk Flickr Image Highlighted in Yahoo Search 
  Originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.

From Thomas Hawk’s blog post on Flickr images in Yahoo! search results:

The power of Flickr’s superior image search is actually fairly simple to understand. By leveraging the social network that sits inside of Flickr Yahoo can determine identification, relevancy and rank of images.

Excellent strategic decision on the part of Yahoo!

Just Discovered Many Eyes for Visualizations

Via CorpBlawg, I just discovered Many Eyes for visualization of data. Cool!

Vista AERO and Beryl Visual Interfaces

I have seen numerous AERO previews and demos of AERO, the new user interface included with Windows Vista. But I had not yet seen the Beryl Interface for Ubuntu Linux.

One thought that immediately came to mind. As much as Beryl has an unbelievable cool factor. I am not sure it leverages any real increase in lateral visual adjacency. Lateral adjacency to me is the primary limiting factor for user interfaces at a practical level. By definition showing items at an angle lets you see more items in perspective. A rotating cube on the other hand at most shows you three options.

Also see the comments on this life hacker post on dual monitors.

And researching links for this post I just found UltraMon. Wow! Definitely going to test that one out!

IBM Visualization from O’Reilly

From this O’Reilly post on visualization, we are linked to IBM’s Many Eyes. Via this O’Reilly post.