I do a bit of coding from time to time, and I haven’t had a desktop for a good few years.
At my current clients I have a dual screen set up. This is probably the biggest productivity boost your average desk jockey can get. Especially for Excel VBA development, grid on one screen VBAIDE on the other. You can also get a productivity boost by learning good ways of doing what you are meant to be doing but that is a separate post.
All my Codematic stuff gets done on my lapper, and the single screen aspect is a painful retrograde step after the dual screen joy. Of course I could buy a big screen for pennies but that fails the toy justification argument. (In fairness I did have this set up for a while, but it was a 19″ CRT – the size of a small house – and actually what I really want is a projector).
Now I can just get a tablet and use Wifi for that second screen. Obviously I’ll be waiting for the Android version…)
Anyone else seen any compelling tablet justifications?
cheers
Simon
(I promise SOS2011 isn’t just going to be tablets, we’ll get around to some spreadsheet and sw dev stuff eventually)
[edit: I meant to add this link to the latest US research showing Android romping forward from third to second in the smart phone market]
Smurf on Spreadsheets 
Monday, 10th January, 2011 at 8:12 pm |
Unless RIM is going to pull a tablet or 2 out of their posteriors SOON, I figure they’re beginning their downward slide. Maybe not since Blackberries are still the most common employer-provided smartphones in the US, but that only means no contraction rather than the prospect of continuing growth.
While Android phones may become consumers’ 1st choice, I wonder how many businesses and other organizations are going to embrace it. Flip side: if MSFT insists on Windows proper instead of Windows Phone (so possible 3G/4G rather than WiFi connections) on tablets, I can’t see them becoming a consumer favorite. Then again, since WP7 seems to shun the concept of the app store, maybe Windows proper is necessary in order to use a wide variety of software on Windows tablets.
Tangential questions. Can Android run, say, Gnumeric? If so, anyone tried it? If so, how is it?