Portable Fiasco

Maybe you've heard about one of the new features of Windows 7, called Windows Snap. It offers a way to resize windows to exactly half the screen size very easily, which can be very useful with large monitors.

Windows Snap looks useful, but trivial enough that I wonder why it wasn't included in Windows sooner. And on its own, it's hardly compelling enough to make upgrading seem worthwhile.

It seems there's a free program called GridMove which offers a much more advanced and customizable version of this feature for any version of Windows. It can be used to imitate Windows Snap, or it can be set up to offer more complex window arrangements. As you drag a window around the screen, GridMove shows a shaded rectangle indicating the size and position the window will snap to if you drop it there. And you can still resize windows by hand if you wish.

On my newish Vista-based PC, GridMove is so responsive that it feels like it's built in to the OS. On my eight-year-old old XP system at the office, it's pretty sluggish, although it's still quicker and more accurate than dragging windows around by hand.

GridMove is configured with simple text-file scripts that divide your screen (or screens) into rectangles called triggers and grids, which go together in pairs. Drop a window on a trigger, and it will snap to the corresponding grid. In simple configurations, triggers and grids are the same size and shape; in more complicated arrangements, they're often different. Several grid scripts are included with the program, and it's easy to write more. There's even a forum thread devoted to user-created grids.

You know you're dealing with serious camera gear when the accompanying photographic advice is along the lines of "And remember... lift with your knees."

As for image quality, even wide open it's quite lovely. Stopped down to f/8 and f/11 it's actually quite remarkable. How remarkable? From midtown Manhattan we were able to read the street signs on the corner of JFK Boulevard East and 43rd St. in Weehawkin New Jersey when viewing image files at pixel resolution.

If Google's reckoning can be counted on, that's probably about 1.75 miles. Not quite spy-satellite territory, I guess, but much closer than most of us will ever get.

(via kottke.org)

The other day I griped about newfangled computer monitors. There is a school of thought, though, that says that higher resolution and additional screen "real estate" -- however you get them -- are absolutely good things.

When Czerwinski walked around the Microsoft campus, she noticed that many people had attached two or three monitors to their computers. ... The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? ... The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen...

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains.... In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity.

-- Meet the Life Hackers [NYT]

Predictably enough, some of the studies that make such claims turn out to be sponsored by the makers of big monitors and fancy video cards. And there's reason to think that the benefits, though probably not imaginary, are greatly exaggerated.

In a perfect world, my boss would buy a big-screen monitor for my office, and I'd get to evaluate the benefits for myself before spending my own moolah. I'm not holding my breath on that one, though.