39″ Seiki 4K monitor is GREAT!

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

April 23, 2014

I have been reading quite a bit about 4K monitors. I recently spotted an article that suggested that these screens are PERFECT for software developers.

I watched several videos and deduced that the screen real estate would be fantastic. The ability to see ALL your code while having sufficient browser tabs open along with Chrome’s debugging console sounded very appealing.

So I ordered one on Monday. It arrived Tuesday. I opened it this morning and bemoaned that I didn’t have a converter for HDMI…until I realized my MacBook Pro came with an HDMI port. And here I am writing my first blog article ON IT!

I have to say that the blog authors were right. It’s GREAT! Up above, you can see it next to my MacBook Pro 15″ retina. I have personal email, skype, and HipChat on my laptop, while my development environment is spread across the big screen.

I am working on a couple things right now. On the left, I have IntelliJ open with a demo app I’m working. I have the app running in the top, the HTML open on the left, and the javascript open on the right.

In the middle, I have a browser tab open towards the bottom, with my mobile user agent switcher activated so I can build my jQuery Mobile front end. Seeing it all in one place without jumping between screen shots is fantastic.

The TALL console window in the middle is currently running a crawler script I wrote in python. We had reports of some of our guides having broken links, I decided to crawl our website to spot any other gaps. On the right, I have script opened in TextMate, and you can see the WHOLE file with scrolling.

The takeaway is breathtaking.

Cons

I am learning how to navigate everything. I tried mirroring at first, but that doesn’t work. I want the relatively unimportant stuff not hogging screen space, so I learned how to shove that onto the laptop.

On this big screen where the refresh isn’t ideal, I kept losing the mouse. So I increased the size of arrow so I simple movement would quickly show me where it was located.

The screen refresh rate isn’t the highest, but that isn’t a real big issue for me.

Finally, I still don’t understand when and why OSX decided that Alt-Tab will pop-up on one display or the other. It seems to have a mind of its own. But I’m willing to live with that in exchange for this supreme work setup.

4 Comments

  1. Greg Turnquist

    I’ve already learned many tips and tricks.

    1. Dragging the mouse to the bottom if the screen causes the menu bar to move to that screen.

    2. Mousing between screens is tied to the physical arrangement in Display settings. I adjusted things so my MacBook Pro is low and to the left. Now mousing is perfectly smooth and predictable.

    3. When the screen goes to sleep, all my windows on the big screen get shoved together. Still working on that.

    Reply
    • Greg Turnquist

      I now have a solution regarding (3). The Stay app[1] solves this predicament perfectly. Now it’s no problem to:
      1. Get all your windows set up perfectly.
      2. Unplug big screen and run to meeting with laptop.
      3. Return and connect big screen. See all windows reassume their previous position.

      The app only costs $15, and after a few days of trying it out, I’m ready to buy.

      [1] – https://cordlessdog.com/stay/

      Cheers!

      Reply
  2. David

    Yes. the alt-tab popup appears on whatever display most recently displayed the dock, if you have dock hiding turned on.

    Lately thought the amount of cmd-tabbing ive been doing to switch between intellij and web browser has given me thumb strain, so i switched to Launcher Mode in Karabiner, and it is so awesome.

    Reply
  3. groodertenong.science

    It takes a bit of tinkering with the advanced colour controls but it is possible to get a good colour reproduction. I am using a Dell as a second monitor in my setup and the Seiki colour output is pretty well on par with the Dell, the Seiki though is much more vibrant making the Dell look washed out in comparison.

    Reply

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