[WEB4LIB] Re: The Future

[Alain D. M. G. Vaillancourt]

Who needs multiple monitors when they can have virtual multiple
desktops?

Any normal person.

I have seen such virtual desktops for at least a decade in Unix
environments.  My favorite one was a nine-screen or nine-desktop affair
where you could switch from one desktop surface to another by using the
keyboard or by clicking on a tiny 9 position three by three grid in a
taskbar.  The grid also gave you an indicator of which of the nine
desktops you were on.  For years, I thought that this was the wave of
the future, and so did my doctoral thesis advisor.  Then I ran into
research and tests on normal people and still more tests that proved
that only the techies who set these things up or a small coterie of
savvy digital librarians who tinker with command lines can be really
comfortable or productive with these "switching desktops".  Back to the
old drawing board!  In other words, the news about the first OLED
breakthroughs back in 1998-1999 was really the first sign of new
surfaces for browsing the Web or visualizations of Web spaces (quite
another topic) with the possible exception of seam-aware software
running on mosaics of monitors in an intermediate stage.

Alain V. 

 --- "Gimon, Charles A" <CAGimon at mplib.org> a écrit : 
> My web work at home is done in a Gnome/Linux environment. Four
> separate
> desktops available by clicking buttons in the taskbar, effectively
> quadrupling the desktop real estate. Feature has been available for
> years
> and years in the various Linux or Sun environments (KDE, CDE, etc.)
> that
> I've worked in. Who needs multiple monitors?
> 
> What this broader issue says to me about web use is that with larger
> viewing
> environments, particularly "theater" screens with extra-wide aspect
> ratios,
> people seem somewhat less likely to maximize their browser window to
> known
> dimensions (800x600, 1024x768, 640x480), and more likely to size the
> browser
> window to their comfort zone within a much larger display.
> 
> --Charles Gimon
>   Web Coordinator
>   Minneapolis Public Library
> 
>  

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