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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how anyone could think dual screen is a gimmick that had a DS. There were a lot of games that put those two screens to good use. I am serious.

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It could have done the same with 1 larger screen. But the DS is a foldable device. It's not a gimmick, it's part of the operation of the device. I use dual screens at work, because they are smaller lower resolution screens. At home I have 1 huge high resolution screen. Not having a physical separation is amazing.

Angular size is key. When I'm on my desk I have multiple screens that cover about twice as much as my laptop when I'm working away from my desk. Since the screen is closer, I can increase it's density and then I have almost as much real estate as on my desk.

Not sold on this reasoning.

Attaching a second monitor doesn't suddenly make your main display useless.

One of the things I completely fail to understand is why most people I work with close their laptop displays when docked to secondary monitors.

I have a 34" 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor at home on my desk, and I use that plus my Macbook's display.

At work, I use 24x 24" 1440p monitors, and I use thoes plus my Surface Pro's 12" display.

When I'm out and about, on my Macbook or on my Surface, I definitely miss the extended displays. A lot.

I’m trying to work out whether that 24x monitors is a typo, and if not what you’d use them all for. I’m a huge proponent of multiple displays but anytime I use more than three the mental overhead of trying to remember which display something is on (or even finding something for every display) becomes to much.

My dream setup is two 2x2 clusters of square monitors siding a camera. Sadly, it's hard to make the camera glow red and Douglas Rain is no longer available to do its voice.

It's also probably not well suited for software development work, but it'd be a killer operator's console.

I know it's not the same thing, but damn the Nintendo DS sold me on multi screen games. Wish there were more.

I always thought it was a gimmick on the DS too. I don't remember any game that did anything interesting with it that couldn't also be done on a single larger screen.

[spoilers] 999 relies on the two screens for the actual purposes of constructing the narrative(s), as well as for the big reveal at the end. The story is unfortunately a layer shallower on the PC port of the game (not to mention that you have to choose between one of two options for dialogue, neither of which is all inclusive).

> 999 relies on the two screens for the actual purposes of constructing the narrative(s), as well as for the big reveal at the end

What does it do with two screens that couldn’t be done with one screen divided into two halves?

The screen being arbitrarily divided into two halves would give away a huge plot element pretty quickly, if you are paying attention, as well as some smaller stuff. You aren't actually controlling Junpei, as you are led to believe for the entire game, at least, not really. You are actually controlling a girl in the past named Akane, who is seeing the world through Junpei's eyes. The trick is that Akane's observations are actually happening on one screen, while what Junpei experiences happen on the other. You would be pretty crazy to see the observations made as coming from anyone but Junpei, given the context, except the whole screen thing, even though there are weird little issues of phrasing that don't quite make sense, but if the game was arbitrarily played on two screens, it'd give that bit away.

There's also the part near the end where you play as Akane directly, and you play with the DS turned upside down in your hands, but that's more minor versus the fact that the entire game actually takes place on a meta level.

That's a gimmick (defined as: An innovative or unusual mechanical contrivance; a gadget.) and hardly proof that dual screens aren't a gimmick . It sounds very creative and may have been well executed, but it's still a gimmick that won't make it into other games.

I played the hell out of my DS, but the second screen was mostly a crappy input mechanism.

I still don’t get it - the two screens are still next to each other right? So what’s the difference between two screens next to each other, and two regions of the same screen? I don’t understand how the effect is any different.

Fit in your pocket

Consider this: To gain any information from a screen, you must actually look at it. You can only look at one screen at a time. The entire functionality of a second screen can be replaced with a single button: While that button is pressed, the screen shows whatever else it needs to show.

It is true that pressing a button is ever so slightly slower than moving your eyes. But considering all the benefits from saving a whole screen (double battery life! reduced manufacturing cost! smaller device size!), dual screenage is really just a gimmick.

All you need is a button dedicated to "screen" switching in software.

This is how a robot thinks. It's much more intuitive to have two screens where you can see everything in your peripheral vision and dart your attention without any extra thinking.

People with multiscreen setups knows about alt-tab. It's about removing friction.

This is not true for several reasons:

1) Software screen switching is not instantaneous

2) Moving your head is lower friction than pressing a button (and more likely a key chord)

3) Humans have very good spatial awareness and multiple screens have this affordance that a button would not.

1) False. Software screen switching is easily instantaneous. If you literally have two front buffers which, you must for a dual screen setup... there’s no reason you couldn’t flip between them at the refresh rate of your monitor (which is ridiculous but doable). Workspace switchers that run on shitty old X can be and many are effectively instantaneous. Not sure about Windows, but I assume something exists.

There’s more to life than Mac OS X.

3) you can still have a spatial layout of workspaces even with one viewport.

How come in people have been shown to be more productive with dual screens?

Well I didn’t say multiple screens didn't serve a purpose, did I?

Having said that, is there any good evidence of a fair comparison of dual screen vs a fast switching single screen. Most Mac and Windows setups make switching so tedious and slow it’s pretty obvious that dual would be more productive.

I would not be surprised that a truly friction minimized single screen setup (total switching latency from input to display <100ms... which is technically easily achievable (and done in many special purpose devices... just not in PC software).. and ergonomic switching key would approach dual screen in productivity. I mean, this is the typical setup I and many others use on a Linux laptop for dev work. By the time someone gets MC on OS X up, I can literally switch “screens” 3 or 4 times.

I enjoy a multimonitor (4) setup, but I’m not about to trade off battery life and space for it on the road.

Frankly it’s just easier and cheaper to buy a second monitor with state of the art, for most people. I get that. I use OSX and Windows too.

Also, I would expect more than 2 monitors to increase the gap.

Humans evolve. Computer systems aren't exactly "spatial", and virtually all attempts to model them as such have failed. We ought to strive for future vision.

In the case of the DS at least, the big differentiator is that the second screen is touch, and is positioned in a more touch-friendly place.

If your one-and-only screen is touch, you have to lift your arms up away from your buttons to press anything. No matter how much of an impost it is to have to look down a little, I'd say it's still less than having to lift your hand away from the buttons into your eyeline.

Virtual desktops were first envisioned at Xerox Parc and hot keys aren't new but dual screens have proven demonstrably more productive. Why is this?

Glancing from one screen to another is easier and lower mental overhead and you can look for input in your peripheral like text appearing without losing current context. You can also read from one screen while typing in another which is impossible in a non visible workspace.

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