Application Support for Dual Monitors

I’ve been tinkering with the CS3 applications — mostly Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Acrobat. Beautiful interface — very Web 2.0 (again, I use the term under protest) style. The thing that annoys most, but doesn’t surprise me … application bloat. So far, all the applications take longer to open than CS2. Every new release of Adobe Professional gets slower than its previous release

One thing that hasn’t improved much with Photoshop is the ability to use it on a multi-monitor set up. I work with two monitors (and would love to go to three) and it does make a huge difference to my productivity.

However, CS3 has a small improvement for multi-monitor support. When I moved Photoshop CS2’s Window to screen #2, some parts of it didn’t move. With CS3, the whole application moved, but the image file always opened on screen #1 instead of #2. I moved CS3 back to screen #1 (the whole thing moved including the image) and opened another image. The image always opened in screen #2! No matter what, I could never get the images to open on the same screen as Photoshop’s application. How funky is that?

When I work in Word, new files always open where I expect them to — in the same screen where I click “Open” in Word. If I double-click a Word file from outside the application (i.e. File Explorer), it opens in the same screen where I last touched Word. I believe this should be standard GUI practice. No surprises. Since we’re seeing more and more web-based applications as well as dual-monitor owners… this is something developers and usability experts need to understand.