Videos and screens

June 11, 2023

I am consuming more WWDC content - so much content! At the moment I am chewing through The talk show live recording with Gruber and a cavalcade of Apple people. Gruber wrote in his post that one should watch it on the best and largest display you have, so I am now watching on the 6K Dell. I have the video in a picture in picture window, with plenty of space for this text and other windows around it, and thanks to the display size, the video is … darn this is confusing … 3K resolution, I guess? One fourth of this screen is just a silly amount of pixels.

6K monitor displaying video in one quarter of the space, other windows on the rest 6K monitor displaying video in one quarter of the space, other windows on the rest

(A full size version of that screenshot also exists here.)

I work well with small screens and enjoy doing a lot of work on just a small laptop screen, but a large amount of space on a single screen does really change how you can work with and place windows. Even the difference from 5K to 6K is significant, the more space I add to the main screen the more fluid window placement seems to become. It is easy to imagine that there would be a readjustment period, and then windows would sort of settle into new positions, but I am not so sure. I think the extra space might afford more room to breathe, and thus more space gives the windows more room to sort of lie around and get re-shuffled as needs and current context change. A window rarely needs even half the screen, and even if for example a browser window uses half the screen for one context it most certainly will not in other contexts. So, more movement. And - thanks to the extra room - less exact placement. Things have the space to be moved about and resized when needed, so precisely placing any single one is just needless work.