Sean's Technological Journeys

I’ve been thinking for a while about my development experiences, and why I will often go out of my way to do something like access my development environment (Eclipse on Linux) through an NX server – and happily suffer through the slow screen refreshes – just so I can have a better time coding.

My ThinkPad X61T is an acceptably fast Santa Rosa-based laptop, with 4GB of RAM, a Core 2 Duo, and a 7200rpm HDD. Those specs make it pretty well-suited to building software. But it suffers from one limitation and one annoyance.

The limitation is that the screen resolution is only 1024x768. Development environments often have a great number of different panes, popup windows, scrollbars, and so on – these certainly contribute to making the UI more usable and productive. Many of these features are very desirable and I can’t live without them.

I’m looking for a much higher screen resolution in the purchase of my next laptop. But I also want to keep it fairly small. Anything over 14″, I would consider too large. I guess I’ll have to accept a higher DPI on my next laptop purchase, because that way I can get more resolution with less space. But then everything is smaller and harder to read, unless it’s sufficiently bright

When I’m developing with a good display resolution, things are smoother. Eclipse is very flexible about hiding stuff so you can read code that goes above 80 columns per line, but it takes time to have to minimize the overhead of the other panels so you can actually _see_ 80 columns on 1024x768. It’s much nicer to leave everything open all the time, so you can just click what you need, when you need it.

I think I’ll hold out until Nehelem-based laptops are available and not way overpriced. Then I’ll look at one with a tablet and decent battery life. Then I’ll tack on the best screen resolution I can find. If anyone has suggestions, I’m listening

This isn’t such a useful post, upon reflection - I’m basically just saying that I am better at programming when I have a high screen resolution, so I’m gonna look for a better screen resolution for my next laptop purchase Not as meaningful as other posts in this blog, eh?