Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Category Archives: Office Computing

Standard App Screens

I recently blogged about how when you are at home you should have the most screen real estate as possible to make that experience great. However I now want to take a look from a different perspective and that has more to do with the fact that just because you have a huge screen does not mean you have to use it.

Now I had to buy a 22” screen recently purely so I could run an app that had the temerity to require a minimum of 1024 pixels in the vertical. Now they did not have to do this, and it is pretty much bad screen design to require such an outlandishly high pixel count in that direction and not offer a scalable experience down to the more normal levels. What is more normal levels though? Is it 768 pixels or 600 pixels in the vertical?

There used to be a time when applications were designed to work in 640×480 pixels, but I do believe we are now past that. Then they moved on to 800×600, just about the time when the Internet stated to get real big and so design aims of websites also began to assume that the lowest common denominator was 800×600 as well. In more recent times many app vendors and websites have begun to assume that they can have 1024×768 pixels and this was fine until 15 months ago.

701f This was when the first netbooks began to appear, and those first EeePC 4Gs were 800×480 pixels with scrolling/scaling software to cope with up to 800×600 pixels, which is where I started to really notice that the 1024×768 pixel screen size was pretty much assumed by so many. That Asus though was a bit of a one off, and since the beginning of the year with the 9xx series machines, the MSI and Acer machines it has been pretty much standardised that netbooks have 1024×600 pixel screens.

advent-4211-msi-wind-mini-laptop

When running a number of applications, I have received a number of pop-ups when starting applications like Google Earth that state that I will have a ‘reduced experience’ because of my screen resolution. In addition, the number of websites where I basically see only the main banner, adverts and navigation bar and about 2 or 3 lines of content have is many. So what will happen now? Will the availability of netbooks with screen sizes of 1024×600 pixels roll back designers of applications and websites to assume that is the lowest common denominator now?

Widescreen

I certainly hope so, as to assume that you can use the large screen resolutions also gets into the way of some of the best bits of having a multi/large monitor setup – laying out the screen so I can use multiple applications to their fullest.

The Desk (cont’d)

I followed my own advice yesterday and upgraded to a 22 inch screen from my 19 inch. My reasons were specifically to do with bad software that requires at least 1024 pixels in the vertical, but the extra screen real estate of 3 inches, 150 pixels vertically, and 210 pixels horizontally does come in handy.

If you needed any other reason to do this, you should just look at the prices. Now I do not promise that these screens are the highest speed and quality in the world, but you can now acquire a 22 inch screen for £130 inc VAT in the UK – which compares very favourably to my first 15 inch LCD at £349 inc VAT back in 1999.

You know you need it, and hey I am looking now at USB-Display Link adapters to see if I could drive a 3rd screen of this resolution.

The Desk

desk Do yourself a favour, make your desk as comfortable as possible for your computing. Here you are with a laptop or netbook, and you are scrunched over looking at the 10”/15” screen and using that 75-95% keyboard, and that trackpad which you have never gotten used to. No, it does not have to be this way.

1. Clear the desk area

2. Get yourself a big monitor, a full sized keyboard and a separate mouse.

3. Get yourself a laptop cooler/docking station with a USB hub (separate or built-in)

4. Plug the big monitor into your laptop/netbook and set it up as an extended desktop, keeping the primary as the laptop screen. Save this as a quick select option, taking care to position your external screen as you need it – in other words so you move your mouse off the right edge of the laptop screen and it appears on the left of your second screen which is to the right of your laptop! You have more than doubled your desktop in pixels and you have created a huge screen real estate to do all that work, and you will notice how much more productive this sort of setup is within hours.

5. Plug the USB hub in and get the full sized keyboard and mouse plugged into it, and onwards plug the USB hub (if it is separate) into the docking station, and get working with those. All of a sudden, you are not crouched over the little machine looking like the hunchback of Notre dame.

6. Make sure the cooler is on, to ensure that you have the maximum life out of your laptop and its components when you are using it at full pelt.

7. Make sure that you have plenty of light (natural and artificial) on demand and that you can fully control it.

8. Have you still got an area where you can write? Good. If not, then make one as you will use it – paperwork still exists.

9. Now all you need to do to move off and onto your desk is plug in the USB, the monitor maybe and do a keypress/mouse select and you are docked/portable in seconds. This is the model of the Long Distance Workers Desk.

Online/Small Business Leave Management

Whos Off Leave

Whos Off Leave

This sounds like a diversion from the main point of this blog but it really is not. If you are a small business owner or a consultant/contractor who needs to manage a number of other people then you can be left out in the cold in terms of managing sickness and leave. What I have used in the past and do recommend is the service provided by Whosoff. Whosoff provides a basic free service that gives you a basic workflow for managing the time off that the people you work with do have/need. The major advantage of the system is that this is web and email based, available to all, with a good selection of resources for managing leave entitlement.

It does not have full Outlook or iCal integration but that just has to be a matter of time.

Obviously you do need to ensure that you handle the Dataprotection issues that apply, but this is a very effective system.

WiFi or 3G – Which is best for the mobile worker?

There used to be a time when you would sit back in your hotel, and dig out how you could connect to their WiFi. This might be anything from a ramshackle collection of consumer WAPs connected back to an ADSL service, to something much classier which was the full Corporate option. You generally got something, and it was real pleasant – although certainly in Europe it was not generally free, and could cost upwards of £5 for 2 hours of usage, limited to 150MB during that time. This was shared with everyone around you and you had to either be very trusting (i.e. stupid) or employ encryption techniques for your access overlaid on their network.

We suffered but then came 3G and low cost tariffs that gave you 1GB or more limits at upwards of 350kbps. These limits have increased over time so now you have pretty much unlimited 3G connectivity for less than £30 per month. This access was their for you to use very much anywhere and certainly was very favourable considering that you only had to need to use the Internet for 12 hours a month to make it financially viable, and this is even lower cost now with today’s tariffs.

So what is the best recommendation for the mobile worker? Well unless you are working in the Outer Hebrides then it is 3G all the way, providing you with access whenever you want it, wherever you want it, with more security (no nasty people packet capturing next door) and (if you travel once a week or more) it is generally going to be cheaper.

You can also now spread the love locally if you are part of a team, by getting hold of one of the now many 3G WiFi Routers, that take your dongle or card and share it on a local WiFi network, great for setting up that temporary remote office. This is also condoned and encouraged now by companies like T-Mobile in the UK. So get out there and get yourself a 3G adapter and always make sure you can work (although as I have posted, not a great experience at 70mph on the London Midland Train line).

Laptop or Smartphone

This one is the biggie – as a mobile worker, a long distance remote worker, what is the main technology you need to do your job? Do you believe you need your hulking 15″ or 17″ Laptop that weighs 3kgs (6.5lbs)? Is that really a portable solution? Or are you the newly born iPhone convert who only needs that few small inches of screen and 6 hours of battery life? Which is it? Nick Wingfield at the Wall Street Journal has just written an interesting set of thoughts that at the headline level, imply that we all should be the iPhone convert by now.

However I believe that the choices as to which technology is best, is down to exactly what you have to do and where you have to do it. In fact for the generalist like myself, I see a continuum of devices as being needed for the mobile worker with a very important cornerstone at the centre – decent and effective data synchronisation. This is not fully the cloud world view – oh no, I see the need for the cloud to be part of a complete solution that ends up with data spread from device to device, over the cloud and in the cloud – pretty much of a whole atmosphere approach.

Right now I have been experimenting with Microsoft Live Mesh as that cornerstone, combined with hosted Microsoft Exchange, Activesync, Evernote, Box.net, Logmein and JungleDisk. Some of these are more mature than others (Exchange and Activesync – although I have to be very Microsoft based from a device perspective), some are more small business than enterprise (Logmein/JungleDisk), and some are really flaky – Live Mesh. Right now (let us leave Mesh out of it for now), I have a very effective ecosystem for tech use combining two Netbooks, four other laptops, two mobile smartphones and three separate working locations – to the extent that I can (and have) suffer individual device failures and gone straight back to work – an important characteristic for an independent consultant like myself.

Now back to Live Mesh, this has showed promise and sort of does work but suffers from a failure to sync certain folders for no apparent reason, something I have shared with Paul Thurrott of winsupersite.com. I have stuck with it though, and not returned to Microsoft’s Foldershare or gone to competitors as yet although that is getting close.

So what sort of user do you believe you are? Smartphone or Laptop or somewhere in between, or somewhere else?