I usually try to keep my posts confined to the code and geek realm and keep them out of the “please read about the boring minutia of my day” kinds of posts. This one is on the border, but I think it has a high enough geek-quotient to be let through.
I have a dual monitor setup, two 23″ cinemas. This is not to brag or make you go “oh wow!” it is just to say, that is what I have. If you do any significant amount of work on a computer and you have never tried a dual monitor (or more) setup, then you really should because it is amazing how much time you actually spend on any given day just shuffling through windows and applications on your desktop. Having everything right in front of you is great (this is especially true if you do what I do, which is to say: write software. It probably doubles my productivity to have enough screen real-estate to be able to see the application running, the console, the debugger, and the source all at once).
Anyway, I am getting off on a bit of a tangent. I recently decided that my desk was a cluttered hole (which it was, and probably will be again soon) and once thing that would make it much easier to deal with this is if I moved my displays onto VESA arms. I did a ton of research (which consisted of asking my buddies at Fatlab Music which arms they had for their setup, knowing that they did all the relevant research to pick the best) and decided on the Ergotron LX which are a bit spendy-er than some of the others, but absolutely worth it.
I am not going to go into detail about the install, it is pretty easy, if a bit tedious at times. The design of the Ergotron arms is pretty frakking brilliant so they are very easy to install and attach to your monitors. (note for apple display owners: you have 100mm VESA mounts, but actually you dont, you need to buy a separate VESA adaptor, which is a 100mm mount. But dont fret, the Ergotron comes with a 75mm – 100mm adaptor so all you need is Arm + Apple VESA Adaptor)
So now I can easily access the area under my displays. Before, if I wanted to clear off some desk space so I could sketch on my big A3 pad (for the hell of it, or for actual UI designing) I had to clear off a whole raft of crap and slide the second display out of the way and well, lets just say I hardly ever sketched on my big A3 pad. Also, using my wacom tablet was another big pain in the ass. The wacom requires quite a bit of desktop space. (you can hold it in your lap, which works OK, but you still have to put it down on the desk somewhere. Previously it lived on a shelf above my computer and I rarely used it, now it can live right on the desk, always plugged in and I just have to push my keyboard back and put the wacom in from and voila!
I am not totally convinced I like the vertical orientation of the second monitor, but it is growing on me. If i decide I dont like it, 10 seconds of adjusting and changing display prefs and it is back to horizontal, so no worries.
The only downside I have found so far is that I tend to adjust the display heights depending on how I am sitting. It is almost too easy. Right now I am slouched down a bit so I have the monitor a bit lower than normal. A few minutes ago I was doing some coding and was sitting up much straighter and so I had the monitor a few inches higher to accommodate my better posture. How is this bad you ask? Because I tend to only adjust the main monitor and so my display arrangement gets out of whack (ie when i move my mouse from monitor to monitor i dont want it to jump up or down a few inches as it goes across the border, that annoys me.) So Apple needs to come out with some sort of live sensors that can just _know_ where they are in space relative to each other so I dont have to adjust my display prefs every time I move my monitor up two inches. :-)
Ok, I have been self-indulgent long enough, I promise the next few posts will contain code or some equally nerd-liscious content.
