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The End of Non-Widescreen Laptops?
Santi Onta writes "Today Lenovo retired the last NON-widescreen laptop they offered (the T61 14.1) from the market, and Lenovo is just an example (Apple, Sony, HP, etc. are the same). I understand the motivation behind all the laptop manufacturers to move to widescreen: they can still advertise that they offer 14.1 or 15.4 screens, but the screen area is smaller, and thus they save more money. Some people might like widescreens (they are useful for some tasks), but any developer knows that vertical space matters! Less vertical space = less lines of code in the screen = more scrolling = less productivity. How can laptop manufacturers still claim that they look after their customers when the move to widescreens is clearly a selfish one? I just wish they offered non-widescreen laptops, even if it were for a plus (that I'd be more than happy to pay)." I've always preferred the widescreen aspect ratio -- vertical matters, but having two nice wide columns always mattered more to me. Until this reader's submission, I hadn't realized that it was such a contested issue. Does this matter?
My laptop screen is wide format (1920 x 1200). With that many pixels you can easily have 4 edit windows up at once (2 x 2 array) with each one having the "standard" 80 columns and 25 lines. This still leaves plenty of room around the edit windows for testing windows, frequently accessed desktop icons, etc.
I admit that stuff on the laptop screen is a bit small (it is ~15 inch diagonal), but when using my 24 inch monitor (which I use 99.9% of the time) the display is a thing of beauty.
I thought I would add in a few more points that might influence your stance on this. While standardizing on one is great, I think that we should stick to letting the consumer have the option.
... what with the phone home possibilities of hardware and all. Oddly enough, half the laptops here are IBM's Thinkpads and the other newer half are Dell XPS's (which ironically spurred the widescreen incidents). Leave it to a Fortune 500 company to waste cash on desktop-replacement-laptops.
... something about horizontal viewing that makes me happy. Although I don't do that on laptops or play Warcraft anymore, it may be something to consider.
...
At the company I work at, there is extreme contempt for hooking widescreen laptops up to projectors and smartboards as the user on the laptop cannot view what they are doing on the laptop's screen (if they do it is super distorted to fit on the other viewing device). While this may sound trivial, imagine sitting at a desk facing a class of 100+ people who are looking at huge screens behind you. Not only end consumers but also the enterprise prefers the choice. Although this is kind of a non-issue if only Lenovo is doing that because my employer won't buy from China
And--I'm sure this will come up several times--there is my DVD collection which is mostly widescreen as I have a widescreen TV at home. For this reason, I personally may prefer a widescreen. However, most DVDs are non-widescreen and laptop screens are small enough as it is without having the lost real-estate. Again, probably a trivial aspect unless you travel and watch DVDs a lot.
I do enjoy Warcraft on wide screens though
I agree with the submitter that it is important indeed to leave this decision up to the consumer. Actually, since this is just Lenovo, I wonder if this will hurt their sales? If the consumers want it, the companies will notice
My work here is dung.
I suppose there are developers out there who develop primarily on a laptop. Shoot, I'm even one of them, since we only get laptops at my job.
But I have a docking station hooked up to a 19-inch LCD that I do almost all of my work on, and the laptop display is my secondary display I use to keep my documentation, watch windows, etc. on.
I would think that most developers either have this kind of setup or do most of their development on desktops, which are generally more powerful anyway.
My suppliers got problems getting the normal LCD screens ; they are all widescreen.
I've been forced to buy 2 widescreen LCD's because none of my suppliers could get me decent 20/22" non-widescreen LCDs.
Pretty annoying when coding overnight through a secure shell session, I must say...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
they were the same aspect ratio as an HDTV.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Really?
hang brain.
We could all learn to use laptops sideways for coding:
Boss: Why are you lying down?
You: To be more productive!
Mind the frickin' laser...
I would much rather have a wider screen. Most coders have multiple windows open, and additional width proves more easy for me to use in that case. In addition, long code statements won't fit on a narrow screen and having to scroll sideways to read your code PLUS scroll vertically is a major annoyance. By going wide you removing ever having to scroll sideways - unless you're in excel. It's a big plus for me.
I'm on a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet. As far as I can tell, they are still being sold, and it's a standard 12.1" display on the Tablet and the standard model.
- oZ
// i am here.
14.1" with 1400x1050 vs. 15.4" 1600x1050 ? yes, i choose as a developer the last one. The eye sees more left/right than up/down. With the extra 200x1050 i can keep open my Outline in Eclipse _without_ taking place from my editor in the middle. And for films watching is great too. So yes, widescreen, no gloss ( it's a tool, not a bling ;) ).
How many people actually write code, or for that matter, any long documents? It mostly about media now days where the ability to watch a wide screen movie is a selling point. And, wider screens are a boon to people who use graphics applications like Photoshop where the extra width gets filled with palettes.
Write shorter methods. That is all.
I wrote parts of this stuff
AVOID THE RDS LINKS!
Anything with http://rds.yahoo.com/ because it is a breeding ground for redirected harmful scripts! Send a message to Yahoo to stop this!
I find widescreen is actually much better for development. I'm mainly programming in Netbeans or Eclipse and having the navigator on one side and the 'outline' on the right is great. On a standard aspect monitor, this leaves the central portion for working on code really small. On widescreen (I use a 20" widescreen) this central code portion is much bigger. It's much the same in Visual Studio.
Perhaps if you were only working in a text editor, maybe doing HTML or something, I could agree. Even then though, do I really need 100 lines on the screen at once?
I'd much rather have half the lines on the screen and be able to use the extra features of my IDE to aid in navigation and keep my concentration focused on the area that I'm working in.
I want a Unicorn. They won't give it to me. Instead I get a horse with a candle stuck to its head. What's your point?
Anytime you have competing form factors it's an issue... heck we had a glossy/matte screen thread here just last week. Personally, it's an issue for me, but for different reasons. I want 1000+ vertical pixels. And I want a small form factor that I can easily lug around. To get a 1000+ vertical pixels in a widescreen I need to have a 15 inch screen... 14.1 is my comfort limit. So I lose in this discussion. Not exactly a huge loss though.
Like the man said, vertical desktop real-estate is king! At home I run 2048x1536 (gotta love CRTs), and at work I'm stuck with 1280x1024. While 1280x1024 isn't a wide-screen resolution, it does lack in vertical space. Having a desktop space that is 1280 pixels wide is much less of a problem than having something that is only 1024 pixels tall. Unfortunately this screen isn't rotatable either, otherwise my problems would have been at least partially solved. Wide-screen is fine, as long as you don't skimp on vertical desktop real-estate. If I can keep my 1536 pixels vertically, I care less about how much you give me horizontally (to a limit, of course)
Move sig!
One thing to consider in this is the keyboard. As laptop manufacturers make their laptops smaller and smaller they are almost required to use widescreens in order to keep the device wide enough to have a useable keyboard.
is nice, beacuse all the media player apps I use from bed fit their controls into the bottom & top 5% of the screen
media player, VLC, winamp, the dvd software I use... the bars fit perfectly, I can leave them live and watch 16:9 content
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
What is the actual percentage of the market for laptops who are developers? The summary almost makes it sound like it's the entire user base and that manufacturers are ignoring a huge and important market segment.
Most if not all companies who are shipping laptops, Apple, IBM, Dell, etc... Are purchasing or sourcing their LCD panels to a third party. There are only a handful of companies left producing LCD panels.
That basically covers the issue. Because of the large (due to the HDTV push) number of widescreen panels being created, economies of scale are coming into play. Which means that with less and less 4:3 ratio glass being created, prices on 4:3 are going up while 16:9 and 16:10 glass is getting less expensive.
(Personally, I like my widescreen T61. It's almost enough that I can keep two documents side-by-side on the screen instead of shunting the 2nd document off to a 2nd display.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
if($laptopAspectRatio eq 'Widescreen') { print "all your code on one line!\n"; }
These laptops should make Perl one-liners at least a little easier to read.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
It's not just a case of the manufacturers being selfish. It's a form factor issue.
The biggest limiting factor on a laptop's width is the keyboard. Almost everything else you can shrink and expand without limitation. Resizing the keyboard is not as easy. By messing with the layout you can add or remove a row of keys but that's about it unless you want to significantly shrink the size of the keys themselves.
Add to that the fact that every centimeter of extra screen height equals a matching amount of extra case real estate in front that can't be put to very good use, where as extra width lets you expand the keyboard outward.
So, if you want a more portable laptop any shrinkage is going to have to come from the vertical instead of the horizontal. Also, many backpacks/bags/slip cases have the laptop inserted sideways so one that is smaller in that dimension is easier to get at.
Yes this matters. It is well-known throughout the publishing world that wide columns of text are harder to read than narrow columns. Our eyes are more suited to reading narrow columns of text than wide ones and having to jump from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen to read the next column is not optimal. The current generation of widescreen displays and the way text is laid-out onscreen causes you to lose track of which line you are reading and it also causes you to slow down in order to better keep track of your vertical position.
A display with a higher vertical to horizontal ratio makes it easier to read and edit text on. Text columns are naturally narrower so your eyes have less problems tracking horizontally and the columns are also higher which means that there is less scrolling. It also means that menu bars at the top or bottom of the screen or window take up a smaller percent of the vertical presentation, which uses the display more effectively.
Widescreen is better suited to video and pictures than it is for text. It would be nice to have displays optimized for text so that people who work with text can do so more effectively. One thing I try to do to counteract a widescreen is to place as many elements as I can (toolbars, etc.) in a vertical orientation rather than a horizontal one. By maximizing my vertical space and using the horizontal space to stack bars side-by-side I do what I can to create a narrow, high space for text. It would be much better to have a screen that was oriented this way in the first place but if you can't find one...
Sapere aude!
Wide screens might be better for developers these days with heavy IDEs cluttering the sides of the display with palettes, panels, etc. Thus you don't have much surface left for your code (or it is so narrow that you have to vertically scroll a lot more). At least all other devs at my place envy my wide screen... ;)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more. Junta
The percentage of coders in the over-all laptop market is probably less than 1%. The vast majority of laptop buyers want widescreen. The better question is why laptop manufacturers would create a line of laptops for such an incredibly small niche.
If you think there is a large market for coder/laptops start up a business yourself and make a killing. I won't be holding my breath on that.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I'd rather have a widescreen display, but one more vertical height than you can currently buy these days. Leave the width the same, just change to height.
Sorry guys, ever since I started putting my homemade porn online, wide screens have become necessary.
If you know what I mean.
While vertical height matters and is definitely useful, I find myself hindered more by lack of width than height these days. Try working on code in one window, with some reference code in another window, and maybe a website with the online documentation in another window without widescreen on a 15" or smaller monitor. Of course, you can mess about minimizing and maximizing back and forth, but a lot of times it's far more productive to be able to have at least 2 of those up side by side while maintaining enough width of the window to show the majority (or all) of the relevant lines of code.
Also, using a modern IDE like visual studio or eclipse on a 15" monitor can be somewhat miserable. Those are clearly designed to be used on a widescreen monitor, imo given the default layouts and how small your code window ends up.
If you go through the small business sections of many computer companies sites you will find that they offer a lot of the features they took away from the home market. They are also often better machines for around the same price (if you spec/quote carefully). This is similar to the glossy vs matte screen post from last week... Example Latitude D530 from Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d530
I'd think that the move to widescreen is global, and not reduced to laptops. Desktop screens in bigger sizes are only widescreen. I think 20" is about the maximum you get in 4:3. Even these are in very short supply. 22" and 24" are just widescreen, and of course I don't think we'll ever see a 30" 4:3 monitor, even if that were desirable.
I think the laptops are adapting to a general tide in the industry. It's probably not economically viable to keep making 4:3 screens. Also, the laptops have an easier time growing horizontally. You can after all offer a better keyboard. But vertically there is nothing you can add at the "other side of the clap" that has user value.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Thanks. I'll try to make that mistake fewer.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I don't know if this is a factor in the move to wide screens or not, but supposedly the golden rectangle is the most visually pleasing rectangle. It has an aspect ratio of 1.618.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
The form factor allows for a lot less wasted space below, where the keyboard is, for a device that's overall smaller and easier to carry and stick on small tables. This seems like it was written by someone who never actually carries a laptop around, or just lugs it between desks and plugs it in.
If you're only using it at a desk, why not just buy a desktop and a widescreen monitor that you turn 90 degrees, so you can get full page views? (Actually, there have been laptops offering detachable, rotatable screens, but they have not been that popular)
I just opened my Macbook's terminal window and expanded it to full size. Got 209x53. That's on a 13 inch widescreen, with OSX's nonremoveable menubar and other window dressing, Monaco 10 pt. Unless you've got a cumbersome IDE, is that really not good enough for coding on the go?
Why does Bose spend their R&D budget on better speakers?
Woah, when did Bose start doing that?
This guy's the limit!
We're not talking about iPods and iPhones. Read: MacBook Air demand trails that of original Intel-based MacBook, with winners like:
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
I just posted a link above, reporting on the MB Air's shitty market performance to date. Here are a couple more.
http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/02/12/resellers-say-macbook-air-sales-arent-as-brisk-as-original-macbook/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/165960/macbook-air-sales-deflated.html
I can't locate sales figures for the 12" PB G4, but I can state anecdotally that I saw many of them, with satisfied owners. A reasonably fierce following, too. Conversely, I have not seen a single MB Air nor do I know anyone, including all members of a Mac users' mailing list I am on, who owns one or even wants to. I don't think Apple chose the most profitable market segment here.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
And I don't recommend that large a virtual display for general-purpose use; things can get "lost" in the corners ;-(
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
While we're on the topic, if we must have widescreen laptops, then why cant they use the extra horizontal keyboard real estate for a regular cursor control block (inverted T and pgup/pgdn etc in their normal correctly spaced and gapped positions)? I am sure some people swear by their regular numpad which has recently shown up on some widescreen laptops, but arent there at least as many people out there that spend all day editing text (and code) as there are folks that spend all day entering numbers?
He who does it first will have my laptop kilobucks.
There's nothing wrong with widescreen. It's more suited to our eyes for watching movies, and it forces developers to consider how their app looks and feels when tiled on the screen and used in conjunction with other on-screen apps (ie, *gasp* multitasking) instead of being maximised all the time as if it where the only app.
Widescreen is also great for developers, artists, designers, writers, and many other professionals, since you can rotate the screens and get a vertical, page-oriented layout.
BUT, the problem is that rotation is rarely supported -- not on laptops, or on monitor stands. On graphics cards, it's "supported" usually, but without acceleration, which sucks. How hard can it be to rotate 90% before applying an operation on today's super-fast graphics cards?
If the resolution is high enough widescreen is fine by me, usually I just put my taskbars and docks on the left of the screen and i'm left with a 4:3 area for doing my work. The real issue for me is with the total crap laptop screens with 1280x800 resolutions where there isn't enough room to do anything like that. That said, i bought a Lenovo x61 a few months ago and I love it, the 12in isn't as small as it sounds, i can hardly tell the difference between this and a 15 in panel. Lenovo may reconsider their decision, seeing as the x61 and x61-tablet are their most popular products right now.
Whining Dev: "Waaah! This 1280x1024 screen is too small! I can't see all my code on it!"
Manufacturer: "All right, fine, here's a 1600x1200 screen."
WD: "Wellll... okay, you live THIS time..."
DVD Watcher: "Hey! Why can't I watch my DVDs in widescreen on my laptop?"
M: "Fine, fine, here's a 1920x1200 screen."
DW: "Yaaaaay! And my desktop looks so much bigger, too!"
WD: "HEY HEY HEY! What the hell is this? My screen isn't tall enough now! I want more height so I can see more code!"
M: "But... but that's the exact same screen height you used to have and just bugged for a few minutes ago. It's the width that's-"
WD: "TALLER SCREEN NOW FOR I AM INCAPABLE OF RUNNING MY CODE EDITOR NOT-MAXIMIZED AND IT IS WHOLLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE FOR ME TO FIND OTHER USES FOR THE EXTRA WIDTH"
M: *deep sigh*
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
that can flip vertically like this:
http://www.hardware.info/images/news/flexscan_s2031w_550.jpg
I'm a developer. Widescreen also means longer lines of code before wrapping, so less vertical scrolling.
I'm not all that put out, honestly. I've got a 1680x1050 widescreen on my laptop, and if it were 1600x1200 I'd get a few extra lines of text, but big deal. My previous favored resolution was 1280x1024, so I actually get more pixels in both dimensions.
I can also watch 16:9 movies on it when I'm not coding, and I like that feature more.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
One of my pet peeves about windows is that they layer the tool bars horizontally by default. They even use a menu bar per window.
then they put the widow dock along the bottom along with all sorts of crap. this chews up vertical real estate.
Most of the most poliched linux window managers make the same mistake. It's almost like you have to have virtual windows simply because they mismanage the screen realestate.
DSL linux's default window manager is a notable exception, and is very parsimonious about its use of screen area, presumably because it expected to be used on small screens of older machines.
Apple is better about saving screen real estate, since all windows share a single thin menu bar and the doc can be moved to vertical. Traditionally they use smaller icons and fewer of them so their toolbars usually are single width and thin (some notable exceptions however, like preview.app) Apple even puts the equivalent of tabs on the side of widows rather than the bottom (i.e. the window managers offer sidebars typically).
So perhaps it is not a surprise that apple was an early adopter of widescreen.
In my personal habits, I prefer widescreen because I feel like I can juggle more windows than with a vertical screen. But I get enraged when windows have all sorts of menu crap and tool bars that gobble my vertical screen realestate.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
What you should be complaining about is the inability of Windows and many of the apps to negotiate a dual-monitor configuration.
It's long past time that Windows and its apps got some standards of behavior in the multi-monitor world.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Two words: Line breaks
They not only make your code fit better on a narrow screen, they also make it more readable. Also, if you're indenting so far that you need the horizontal space, you really should refactor -- your function is too complex.
Although the old standard of 80 columns is no longer required for printing, it's still a pretty good idea.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Put the laptop on it's side. Now you've got the tallest laptop screen in the coffee shop man. Everyone will be all "Ohhh is that the new Mac laptop I heard about?"
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I'm a developer, and got my first wide screen display about 6 weeks ago. I'd never go back. Most of my routines are fairly short, but because I tend to use DESCRIPTIVE names for things, my lines tend to be LONG - I actually scroll a heck of a lot LESS with a wide screen
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Why kick against the goads of commerce and progress? Why complain about that which you cannot change? You are flotsam on the sea of technology...
Besides, my MacBook is pretty and trendy and makes me look smart.
Actually, I've come to like the wide-screen format for placing my IM buddy list on the left and OSX dock on the right. It works nicely. Code? Yeah, that's mainly what I look at all day. The center area for content and side areas for BS is the Slashdot model!
Actually... that's the point. Since Slashdot began its been begging for a wide screen monitor. The OEMs are finally giving into the Slashdot imperator by providing Slashdot-optimized widescreen monitors!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Years ago, I remember the "Radius" monitors that were sold as higher-end displays for Apple Macs. They easily rotated the 4:3 aspect screen between a "portrait" and a "landscape" mode, and as I recall, the computer received a signal that it was rotated (mercury tilt sensor in the display, I guess?), so it would automatically flip the video signal to match it.
Seems like that whole thing never really caught on though, and I don't see why not? I'd love to have a wide-screen notebook that would allow you to pull up on the display to extend it a few inches from the notebook, and then let the user rotate it to portrait mode to read full PDF pages at a time and so on.
If that's too much to ask, at least I'd like to see more desktop LCDs supporting rotation. My Samsung Syncmaster 213T did this nicely, except you still had to tell the computer you rotated it afterwards. (Is it THAT much to ask to integrate some sort of rotation support with modern video cards, so a display being turned can tell the ATI or nVidia board you need to rotate the video display 90 degrees?)
One thing to consider is that, as users, we've grown much more accustom to scrolling up and down, but scrolling left/right is still pretty awkward. Widescreen allows less left/right scrolling and keeps us scrolling the way we are used to (up/down).
Why are ACs allowed to post links anyway? That's just asking for abuse. IMHO, link posting should be limited to non-AC posters. ACs should be there for people to express their own opinion anonymously because of fear of repercussions, not provide links to other people's opinions. AC posts should be the exception, not the rule, and they should be a lot more limited than real account posts as a result.
On the widescreen thing, non-widescreen laptops are going away because of people wanting to watch movies in the car or on airplanes or whatever. That's the only time I'd ever watch a movie on anything other than a large widescreen TV....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Why are you maximizing your browser? I have my Pidgin buddy list on the upper right, a terminal (partly covered by the browser) on the lower right, the browser taking up about 2/3 of the screen dead center, and my desktop icons are visible on the left.
If I open another window (say a PDF reader or OO.org) it goes to the left of the browser, just wider than a page, so that it overlaps the browser somewhat.
This idea that browsers should be maximized is a disease. Do your part to eradicate it.
Care about privacy? Read this!
"perephriel (god why is Firefox's spellcheck so retarded?)"
Peripheral. It's phonetic. \p-'ri-f(-)rl\. Don't blame the spell checker when the problem is clearly yours. Hell, Google knows what you mean by "perephriel", but that's only because Google's been filtering the sewers of humanity since it was switched on. If it ever goes sentient, we're all fucked.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
The golden section is a matter of the taste of the majority, at the very least. It doesnÂt matter for something _you_ get done for yourself. It matters for things we all use.
Maybe I was not clear enough. I meant height as in physical height.
What I meant is that your argument about real estate is not the only way of seeing it. You are complaining that the same laptop has less height.
Maybe itÂs that the same laptop now is wider.
A 4:3 14" laptop has 9.16 inches of height. A 16:9 15.4" laptop has 9.24 inches of height. The only difference is that you get 4 extra inches on the X axis. The same happens with 15" - 17"wide laptops.
You could complain that it's heavier, of course.
Even that is not true with current HP computers.
You can't complain it's more expensive, because 15.4 laptops are the cheapest ones available for most manufacturers, cheaper than the equivalent 14.1 . It's not as they are charging you for the extra 4 inches.
It's not a conspiracy to rob you of your pixels. It's a new standard that new tech makes available (now there are no CRTs we need to be similar to) and works for more people. And we like it.
The problem is that the "widescreen" displays being offered are, by and large, no more wide than were your old displays. That's what ticks me off the most. 1280x1024 was a decent resolution a couple of years ago. But then "widescreen" came out and, oh, what do we have?
1280x900. Gee whiz, thanks! Since it's now clearly rectangular it's "wide", but all they really did was cut off one or two hundred pixels from your vertical rez. Exactly how did I benefit from this? Drives me absolutely insane. Finding laptops above 900 pixels vertical is quite a chore; I know, because I've spent quite a while pricing them out for work and I refuse to go below 1050.
I like my 1680x1050 screens just fine, but they still don't compare to the 1600x1200 screens of yore, which are nearly impossible to find these days. Sacrificing 80 pixels in the horizontal to gain that kind of vertical resolution is fine by me.
I realise everyone's needs and preferences are different, but I am so, so tired of manufacturers touting this OMFG WIDESCREEN garbage like it's the second coming, when in reality it's just as wide as it was before, and significantly less tall.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
When I got my 1680x1050 wide screen laptop I thought it'd be great! I'd be able to have 2 apps on the screen at the same time, no problem. Right?
I gave up on that. Is there an easy way in Windows to manage the space? Maximizing takes up the whole screen (go figure). Dragging and re-sizing every app I want to use is a pain.
It's be really nice to be able to 'maximize' a window and it automatically take up half of the horizontal space. MS Word + Firefox would be great on the same screen.
I dual boot, so multiple desktops in linux solves this problem nicely. The 'PowerTool' app for XP's multiple desktops is not good.
Any suggestions?
What does HDTV (37" - 52"+ panels) to do with laptops (14" - 20" panels) ??? Have you compared the pixel size of a HDTV and a laptop? Economies of scale? That's to say motorbikes are now getting more expensive because more and more people by these 4-wheel vehicles called cars.
I, on my hand, would like to question if you really need your buddy list constantly visible, or, for that matter, if you really need to constantly reserve space for a potential PDF document. Wouldn't it be better to use that space for the browser while you're not actively reading the PDF?