Dualing Monitors
Editor, AppleI have been using dual monitors for coming on eighteen months and love it.
One problem with dual monitors when using OS X is the quality of the second monitor has to be very high for real Mac feel. My primary monitor is the built in iMac monitor, and my original second monitor, which displays Windows just fine, looked like viewing a the Mac OS through a dirty window despite all my efforts to adjust settings and calibrations. With the Apple Cinema Displays ridiculously over priced this was one of those small annoyances.
Recently I upgraded my second monitor to a Dell SP2009W (yeah, I've no idea how they picked such a cool name either). This monitor is awesome. Within about 10 minutes of messing with the settings, including one that put it in Mac mode, and calibrations I have two monitors that show off the beauty of the Mac OS to an equal degree. I can now truly swap back and forth applications that I would n
I also got a 3M adjustable monitor arm that, apart from making the monitor look like it is suspended, can flip the monitor between portrait and landscape modes. And anything in between if you wish to code on angles. I was excited to try coding in portrait mode as it seemed like it would show more code. This is great for browsing a folder structure and working on one file but when a 20" widescreen monitor is turned to portrait it becomes very narrow. The IDE features become very far apart from each other so for now I have gone back to landscape mode. Below are two photos with this setup.
Portrait view...look at all that code!
More "traditional" landscape.
Saving my Eyes (Cool Mac Trick)
Me, AppleI have pretty good vision and even as I approach my mid-30's do not need glasses or contact lenses. All is not peachy though -- reading light text on dark backgrounds causes me pain about a paragraph or two into reading an article.
A solution, which a friend recently pointed out to me, is to 'Reverse black and white' as Apple calls it by holding down crtl+option+command+8. As you have probably worked out this switches the black and white and allows me to read entries without my eyes hurting.
I tried taking a screenshot but Apple takes a screenshot of the orginal settings not the reversed.
Spotlight vs the Dock
Apple
For years I have liked the Mac OS Dock and found it to be very useful. Over the last couple of months, however, I found I had too many programs in it and opening a n application took some time. So, I starting drifting towards using Spotlight to find my programs which is noticeabley faster. To find an application (or anything in Spotlight) the keys are: command+spacebar then the first few letters of the application. Over time Spotlight learns what you search for and highlights them first. I can type command+spacebar s and have Safari listed in a split second.
My next step was to move the Dock from the bottom of my screen, where I found it hard to know what was open in Leopard, to the left side and strip it of all programs except those that I set to open at login (Mail, iCal, iChat). This gives me a little more room on the bottom of the screen and by using Spotloght the ability to open up applications or contacts or documents very easily. It also helps that I have a new Apple Keyboard that makes typing almost effortless.
My new Dock set up is on the left with Finder, Main, iCal, Safari, iChat, Activity Monitor (set to display RAM usage), Eclipse, XCode, MySQL Administrator, Firefox and CSS Edit all open.
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