You might have noticed in my last post that I have a second monitor on my desk. The imac has a mini-dvi at the back which allows me to add an additional monitor on it. After two days of using it here are the good and bad points of running a dual monitor setup on a mac:
Good points
- Extra screen space
- Power saving – when the imac goes to sleep, the second monitor goes to sleep
- The dashboard widgets can be moved to the second desktop (using Amnesty) so all those cool tools like system stats, digg news, album covers for songs now playing in itunes and the yellowpages are all viewable all the time
- you can choose to either mirror or extend the desktop
- less switching between windows because you can shove something on to one monitor and do something in the other
All great benefits which allow me to overlook any of the following bad points:
- no keyboard combination to send a window to the second monitor
- both itunes and front row only run full screen in the main monitor and the other monitor is blanked out. This means that you can’t run front row or the itunes visualizations while using firefox or something to surf the net on one of the monitors
Hopefully some of these issues will be addressed in the new version of OSX called Leopard but my suspicion is the front row/itunes stuff will continue to be an issue. I know that it makes sense to black out the second monitor, but I wouldn’t mind having a choice.
CineMassive Displays guarantee’s mac compatibility “or your money back” on their arrays. Also, their “CinePort” is a good deal for your macbook. Definitely worth a look: http://www.cinemassivedisplays.com I’m not sure if their “CineMastery” software works with OS X though. Be sure to ask when you call.