I’m fortunate enough to have a particularly wide display. Unfortunately, today’s software isn’t yet very savvy about dealing with the extra real estate.
In tabbed browers, when I open a link in a new tab it loads the content in the background, without disturbing the current page. Nice.
But when I select “open this link in a new window” to glance at what the link points to, Safari and Firefox both open the new window over the current one, obscuring the curent page. It would be kinder for them to notice the copious space next to the open window and fill the new window there, so I can continue reading the original page while it does its business.
Here’s a quick & dirty design to steal: When opening a new window, look around for unused areas of the screen and put it there if possible. Minimize overlap on existing windows. This applies to most multiple document apps, not just browsers.
The point is even more general. Most apps and OS’s are not yet enlightened when it comes to huge monitors. Windows XP has an archaic “maximize” button that offers up the entire screen to the lucky window. This was reasonable in the era of the 15″ or 17″ monitor, but most apps have no clue about what to do with the acres of real estate on 20″ or 24″ displays. (Don’t get me started on the MDI/SDI mess.)
On the Mac things are a bit better because the window zoom button is not sworn to fill the whole screen no matter how gargantuan. A zoomed Safari window, for example, will take the full screen height but will contain itself to a reasonable width. But these common sense limits are not universal. An MS Excel 2004 spreadsheet with only a couple of columns of data will nevertheless fill the entire screen when maximized, obscuring all other windows and forcing the UI overhead task of resizing the window.
The point even extends to web sites. Some of the most common web sites also take the lowest-common denominator approach, scrunching their content into a dense block even for users with larger monitors:
Yahoo.com on Windows XP, maximized on a 24″ window: not the most effective use of whitespace.
Vision to steal:The OS vendors need to describe and demonstrate best practices for making use of big screens and multiple monitors.
Design research topic:What should those best practices be? We need to account for different classes of applications including web pages that must scale between tiny and huge displays, “power apps” like photo, video, music editing that establish self-contained workspaces, and so forth. How can window management overhead be minimized? What is the best approach to floating palettes of tools? How should they work with multiple monitors? How should they adjust when monitors come and go?
