I’m all Mac, all the time, except sometimes at one of the works where there’s a PC on my desk. (And, often, the PC gets shoved back so I can put my Air on the desk and work. My poor little first-version-2008-never-seen-anything-like-it-Air has a better set of debugging tools, starting with a flipping command line.) But I’ve been noticing one thing about the PC that I really like: it’s got a bigger monitor. Doing graphics on a 13″ screen is … painful. I didn’t even realize how painful until I started doing them on a 19″ screen. Noodle on this: all of the eBooks so far have been done on that small little screen… Yikes!
So I asked the inter webs how hard it would be to hook up an external monitor to the Air, and Google was like, duh, that’s the port next to your USB. And your machine shipped with the cables you need. *snap*
Oh. Well, then. I’m clearly not much of a hardware geek…
So right now, via the twin miracles of Amazon.com and money being present in my business account, I’m at home staring at a beautiful 20″ flatscreen monitor and typita-tappiting away on my new wireless keyboard.
Seriously, this screen is so big I don’t even know what to do with myself! I can see my code window and my browser window and still have room for my MAMP controller and a terminal window. Wowza… So much easier to compare code files when you can see them next to each other! I opened up Illustrator, and the controls now take up less than half the screen. Can you even imagine? Craziness, I tell you – rampant craziness. And iPhoto… Oh, how nice to be able to see so many pictures at once!
I read a bunch of reviews on photography and graphics sites that were rather down on the LCD/LED monitor experience, but I’m pretty impressed so far. Also, reports that switching to an external monitor will speed up the Air seem to be true. It’s standing up in a cool little cradle, which totally cuts down on the amount of heat it gathers around the plug-in. All in all, I’m a happy girl. :)
If this doesn’t help me work faster, then I’m a hopeless case.
Now you just need a second monitor…