::scr Dressing up the computer

[struan]

On Fri, Mar 08, 2002 at 09:39:20PM +0100, Arvid Gidhagen wrote:
> 
> On a related tangent, I've been thinking about how large the screen
> can get in its present form. 19" screens are nice. 21" screens are
> nicer. But what about a 36" screen sitting on your desktop? If you
> have a really large screen as close to you as screens normally are
> today, you will actually have to move your head around to see things
> in the far corners of the screen. If you move the screen further
> away from you, you'll have to use larger text (and icons and whatever)
> to be able to read it, and so the point of having a larger screen is
> lost. Not to mention the fact that this setup takes up a lot of space.

I think the more cogent question here is not so much how much
information can we display but rather how much is desirable or
practical to display. I have a 19" monitor which usually contains 3
vertically maximised xterms or a few browser windows and that's about
as much information as i can deal with at any one time on a single
screen. After all you only deal with the contents of one window at any
moment so surely a better to solution that providing more real estate
in which to display information is to make it easier to move between
different sets of information. I do this with multiple desktops but I
can equally see that grouping windows into sets, which is essentially
what I do, and being able to show and hide sets of windows within the
confines of a single destop would also work[1]. Kind of like being
able to assign windows to an item on the finder menu on a mac[2]. 

If you had a really smart UI/OS combination then the meta information
associated with files could be used to determine the groupings
automatically.

s

[1] although as simon pointed out this is essentially what virtual
desktops do anyway.

[2] this may be the wrong terminology as I'm not a big mac user