The perfect portrait
It’s become something of a mantra among the digerati that having multiple displays improves productivity. However, for those of us who can’t afford to deck out our desks like mission control—or who work for employers who are just too shortighted to spring for all those extra screens—there might be another solution: a portrait-based display. I switched my screen at work to portrait mode a few weeks ago (using the freeware iRotate utility), and now, when I go back to landscape on my laptop, I feel like I’m missing half my screen. The portrait orientation works for me mainly because I work with words most of the time, so it helps to have a display that allows me to see as much text as possible without having to scroll. I suspect that anyone working with images or video wouldn’t benefit a whole lot from this, especially given the toolboxes and palette that take up much of the screen in programs like Photoshop. As far as I know, there haven’t been any independent studies about portrait orientation and productivity, but at least one report —from Pivot Software, which makes commercial screen-rotation software, and therefore has a vested interest in the subject—points out that "an average user who spends as much as 6 hours at a computer each day spends approximately 20% to 25% of the time scrolling or other similar tasks." A portrait display, according to the company improves productivity "significantly" (though they offer no specific figures to back this up). The first time I saw a portrait display was on a Xerox Alto (pictured above), a good 25 years ago (the machine was already past its prime, having come onto the market in 1973). In that pre-Mac era, I was wowed by the machine’s GUI, but as someone who was doing word processing to pay my way through college (working on a Wang VS), I was also awed by that orientation. It’s taken me this long to duplicate that cutting-edge technology on my own desktop, but it’s been worth the wait.
