4 ms·

From the comments : "Imagine you were doing research and instead of spreading a number of books across your floor all open at the correct page you had them ope

by eitland 14y ago

From the comments : "Imagine you were doing research and instead of spreading a number of books across your floor all open at the correct page you had them open stacked on top of each other and switched books when you needed to... Now tell me how frustrated you feel. Stuart Wakefield" Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I know the frustration of having to argue over the correct way for me to do my work that my paycheck depends on..

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
> Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I'm the same way myself. I will say that even with multiple monitors "Metro" (modern) apps don't really perform well. For whatever reason many of them aren't very information dense. So even if you move each one onto its own monitor for whatever reason much of the available space is wasted with solid colour or nonsense. Take a look at this for example: http://i.imgur.com/TMSwc.png http://i.imgur.com/TMSwc.png Note how little of that is actual information and conversely how much of it is solid green background.
- vidarh 14y ago
  Ouch. I find myself pulling back from the screen, and then zooming out until it covered a small corner of the screen before I found it readable... At full size I had to move my eyes too much. That's really awful.
vidarh 14y ago
I find that analogy horrible. Switching rapidly between books in a stack would be slow and cumbersome. When you do spread the books out, on the other hand, you have an easy way of making one of them your single focus: Lift it up until it covers your field of view. With books spread out, you do have access to a single window user interface that way. I'm all for having a multiple window UI accessible, or getting a rapid overview. But I find myself much preferring to unclutter my workspaces and have a single focus most of the time, and resort to the overview only rarely, especially because switching is so easy - I don't have to move big physical objects around in a stack, I can rapidly flick through a bunch of open windows on a carousel or get a display with a zoomed out overview. I do find it important to be able to line up multiple windows though. Every now and again a single task will demand more than one window. I think that's where a lot of the disconnect comes from: Multiple windows on screen at once representing multiple tasks is a recipe for mental clutter. Multiple windows on screen that correspond precisely to a single, cohesive task is not.

by eitland 14y ago

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

> Although mostly single window, multiple screens kind of person myself I'm the same way myself. I will say that even with multiple monitors "Metro" (modern) apps don't really perform well. For whatever reason many of them aren't very information dense. So even if you move each one onto its own monitor for whatever reason much of the available space is wasted with solid colour or nonsense. Take a look at this for example: http://i.imgur.com/TMSwc.png http://i.imgur.com/TMSwc.png Note how little of that is actual information and conversely how much of it is solid green background.

vidarh 14y ago
Ouch. I find myself pulling back from the screen, and then zooming out until it covered a small corner of the screen before I found it readable... At full size I had to move my eyes too much. That's really awful.

vidarh 14y ago

I find that analogy horrible. Switching rapidly between books in a stack would be slow and cumbersome. When you do spread the books out, on the other hand, you have an easy way of making one of them your single focus: Lift it up until it covers your field of view. With books spread out, you do have access to a single window user interface that way. I'm all for having a multiple window UI accessible, or getting a rapid overview. But I find myself much preferring to unclutter my workspaces and have a single focus most of the time, and resort to the overview only rarely, especially because switching is so easy - I don't have to move big physical objects around in a stack, I can rapidly flick through a bunch of open windows on a carousel or get a display with a zoomed out overview. I do find it important to be able to line up multiple windows though. Every now and again a single task will demand more than one window. I think that's where a lot of the disconnect comes from: Multiple windows on screen at once representing multiple tasks is a recipe for mental clutter. Multiple windows on screen that correspond precisely to a single, cohesive task is not.