Jonathan Hardwick : Information Tools

David Ornstein talks about FlexWiki - and wall-sized screens

jonathanh — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:55:00 GMT

Scoble has posted a fascinating Channel 9 video interview with David Ornstein. David describes what makes wikis work, how his own FlexWiki advances the state of the art, and speculates about what type of people like wikis.

His PC display setup is also worth checking out — instead of a regular second monitor, David uses a projector to create a monster second image on his office wall. He explains that he picked up the idea when he worked with Bill Hill, an expert on the science of reading who's also been interviewed on Channel 9. Bill believes that you can't concentrate on a "foreground" task effectively if you have "background" information on the same focal plane (I hope I described that correctly). In other words, not only should you move all your IM popups and your stock tickers onto a second display, but you should also make sure that second display is further away from your eyes.

The kicker is that projectors have now fallen in price to the point where using one as a second screen isn't as insane as it sounds. And they're clearly great for collaborative working — that has to be the biggest demo yet seen on a Channel 9 video!

Has anyone else experimented with using a projector as a secondary display? What have your experiences been?

Mark all as read in Outlook - and why the long tail means that web search engines beat Office help

jonathanh — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:28:00 GMT

Cameron Reilly found my post on keyboard shortcuts in Outlook while trying to figure out a better way to do “Mark All As Read”:

Oh, and Jonathan, don't worry about getting this tidbit into office.microsoft.com. Who needs it! Your blog came up as the #4 result when I googled <"mark all as read" shortcut>.

A year ago I’d tried entering “mark all as read” into Outlook’s online help, with no luck. What’s instructive is that I tried it again just now, and it’s still not giving me any useful results.

Now, Office online help has a great web-based system that takes into account dynamic user ratings to get better over time. The problem is that this only works if you already have a help topic written on a subject! With no topic to begin with, and no obvious way to suggest one, Office help is never going to come up with a good result for “mark all as read”.

This is where web search engines really come into their own. Sure, maybe “mark all as read” is an esoteric power feature that only 0.1% of Outlook users will ever want to automate. That puts it way out there in the long tail of potential topics about which it’s probably not worth writing official help articles. But someone, somewhere will blog about it, web crawlers will rank those articles, and suddenly people start trusting search engines instead of the official help system.

Also, only #4? Let’s see if this pushes it to the top of the list :-)

News about MSN Desktop Search and Non-Admin wikis

jonathanh — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 08:40:00 GMT

Time for a couple of wiki news items that I've been saving up for a while.

In a “one small step” moment, I believe that the MSN Desktop Search wiki on Channel 9 is the first wiki to ever be referenced in a Microsoft help file. As you can imagine, this was quite a culture change — kudos to everyone involved in making it happen! Oh, and if you look carefully in the IFilter documentation on that site you might find a reference to future features that the MSN Desktop Search team let slip. Just a hint :)

And now that MSN Spaces is out of beta (with 4.5 million users already), I'm wondering how long their MSN Spaces Feedback wiki can stay as a single page. I keep getting the urge to dive in there and refactor it into several smaller pages, but so far I've resisted. Also, I confess that I'm curious — how long until someone else does the same thing?

Lastly, the running as non-admin wiki has been getting some nice press, both from mainstream outlets (including David Coursey at eWeek and Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post) and from my fellow bloggers (Aali, Eric, and Dirk). Thanks guys!

Update: I almost forgot — the non-admin wiki now has an RSS feed, as all good wikis should. Keep track of updates from the comfort of your aggregator.

Update^2: I gave in to the urge and refactored that MSN Spaces Feedback page...

http://del.icio.us gets funding (at last!)

jonathanh — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 00:26:00 GMT

Congrats to Joshua Schachter for (finally :-)) announcing that he’s taken the money and will now work full-time on http://del.icio.us, his pioneering social bookmarking/folksonomy/community tagging service. Whatever you want to call it, delicious changes how you use the web. I’d been trying to talk Joshua into coming to Microsoft, maybe to do social-computing research with Lili Cheng, or just cool MSN Spaces stuff with Mike Torres, but it didn’t work out.

I think that’s our loss, and I know that some other major internet companies will also be sad that Joshua turned down their offers, but I’m looking forward to seeing what he invents next. His hacking output is phenomenal (delicious was just his hobby!), and I’m sure there’ll be even more cool things to come.

More Microsoft wikis: Getting Things Done, PatternShare, and a player to be announced later...

jonathanh — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 10:27:00 GMT

I spent Saturday night setting up a new wiki for an idea that’s been banging around in my head for a while. When I took a break halfway through and fired up FeedDemon, I found Jeff Sandquist stealing my thunder with his announcement of another brilliant wiki idea – a community wiki for hints and tips on Getting Things Done, the insta-cult productivity approach of David Allen. Jeez, Jeff, what’s a guy got to do to get a little peace and quiet around here to make his announcements in? :-) Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of GTD notes and URLs sitting around, so I’ll contribute them to the GTD wiki… after I get a blog post out of them.

Oh, and did you miss James Newkirk’s announcement of the PatternShare community wiki? Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices group have done a wonderful job of using FlexWiki to slice and dice the many design patterns into different views, making this a required site for anyone building serious enterprise-scale software architectures. Not very surprising when you look at the recent changes list of PatternShare and see Ward Cunningham, Mr Wiki himself, showing up everywhere!

Ok, back to tweaking my own wiki. Watch for an announcement here later this week… preferably on a day when no-one else at Microsoft announces Yet Another Wiki…

[You can find other wiki posts in my Information Tools category]

Microsoft wikis just keep multiplying...

jonathanh — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 11:07:00 GMT

When Channel 9 started last spring I had the slightly crazy idea of getting direct feedback about Microsoft products by letting anyone add their gripes, workarounds, and wishlists to its wiki pages. The first big hit was the Internet Explorer feedback wiki, which rapidly grew to the point where helpful users began refactoring it into easily-digestible pieces. The IE team still hangs out there, although now of course they also have a much more Slashdottable blog.

Then in November the MSN Search team shipped the beta of their MSN Desktop Search tool. Pretty soon I was losing track of all the neat desktop search hacks that the blogosphere was finding, so an MSN Search wiki seemed like another good idea. The MSN Search team took the idea and ran with it, adding pages for the new MSN web search engine as well – you that know a team really “gets” wikis when the guy in charge of program management blogs about it!

And this week there’s been even more Microsoft wiki news. First, Stephan Spencer (who describes himself as “scientist turned web marketing virtuoso”, and he does kinda have that mad-scientist look) had the following nice words to say, which Scoble picked up on:

"Of the major search engines, MSN Search is the only one to employ wikis as a way to encourage customer participation in the product development process. Hats off to Microsoft for showing such leadership!"

Second, Mike Torres of the MSN Spaces team has created an MSN Spaces Feedback wiki, which has already seen a rush of activity. Here’s how he describes what the MSN Spaces team hopes to get out of the wiki:

Why did we do this? Although we have been tracking every single thing sent to us, you don't get to see that entire list. This way, we can all work together to make the list - and you can be confident that the team is following up on your feedback.

Couldn’t have put it better myself

Downloaded the Windows Update Services beta? Try the WUS wiki!

jonathanh — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 21:15:00 GMT

This deserves a post of its own because it’s so cool. One thing I missed in my announcements from IT Forum 2004 is that you can now get a free download of WUS (Windows Update Services) as part of the beta open evaluation program. Naturally this has the standard feedback options of any Microsoft beta: a private beta newsgroup, and bug reporting via BetaPlace. But look what the community has added to the mix — the WUS wiki! This lets WUS users work together to come up with troubleshooting tips, deployment guides, and a what’s new list. Very, very cool. What can a community do for you?

(found via Rod Trent)

Review of FranklinCovey's PlanPlus

jonathanh — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 08:13:00 GMT

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
Gertrude Stein.

One of my resolutions this year was to get some help in sipping from the information firehose that is a typical Microsoft inbox, so back in January I bought a copy of PlanPlus. This is an Outlook add-in from FranklinCovey, and follows the same principles as their successful FranklinQuest series of paper-based planners - prioritized tasklists, daily view, the whole deal. It also has some nice touches such as daily quotations (see above).

Then in the months that followed it seemed like every other Microsoft blog started mentioning the competing "Getting Things Done" system from David Allen: first Scoble (who also persuaded David to start his blog!), followed by Omar Shahine, then John Porcaro, and finally LauraJ. Rock Hymas summed up the differences between the two systems as follows:

"David Allen's Getting Things Done and the FranklinQuest system come from fundamentally different paradigms. Both systems are looking at tasks as actionable items. However, FranklinQuest values the "What should I do today?" view and David Allen values the "What should I do here?" view.

And I've decided that PlanPlus is not for me. I can mostly work around the fit-and-finish issues: the preview pane that downloads all linked images in emails, the home-page calendar view that gets out of sync with its buttons, and the changes to daily notes that spontaneously undo themselves. No, the real reason that I've decided to uninstall PlanPlus is very simple but very compelling - it doesn't work with any other Outlook add-ins. All those cool search tools, such as LookOut? Sorry, can't use them. Send-to-OneNote? Nope, doesn't work. This is what you'll get:

This isn't a new bug - it's been noted on the LookOut forums, and FranklinCovey's tech support admitted it was a known problem back in June. I pointed them to Omar Shahine's article about how "Programming for Outlook using managed code is hard" and offered further help, but heard nothing more. Sorry guys, but this customer isn't waiting around any longer. I'm off to give my money to your competitors instead. Oh, and take a look at Eric Carter's blog - the add-in shimming wizard should mean that programming for Outlook using managed code isn't hard any longer…

“Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.”
Richard Saul Wurman.

FlexWiki released to the world!

jonathanh — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 05:13:00 GMT

If you're looking for a great Wiki implementation for ASP.NET, with a good user base and a whole lot of neat features to build on, look no more. David Ornstein has jumped through all the legal hoops, dotted all the i's, crossed all the t's, and has finally been allowed to release his FlexWiki software as shared source. This joins the previous WiX and WTL projects that have moved from Microsoft to SourceForge, for all you journalists keeping track :-)

I've been a happy user of David's previous versions of FlexWiki, both internally and on Channel 9, and now there's even more cool features to look forward to - like WikiTalk:

WikiTalk enables content contributors to access .NET framework objects for dynamic content while working within the traditional Wiki environment and it allows .NET developers to easily expose rich dynamic functionality to writers of Wiki content

Anyone who's remotely interested in wikis or collaborative software should check it out - or come back in a month or two after the community's had a chance to bash it around a bit and create even more wonderful things from it. Big, big thanks to David for hanging in there and making this happen!

Sharing your bookmarks: http://del.icio.us, wikis, and the zen of SharePoint

jonathanh — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 09:59:00 GMT

Most of us have way too many bookmarks (favorites) in our web browsers. Bookmarks that we've accumulated over the years, bookmarks that we haven't visited in ages, bookmarks that we jealously hoard from the prying eyes of our friends and co-workers. Well, ok, maybe we're not actively hoarding them, but the way our browsers are designed we might as well be. Our bookmarks are a great example of what conference keynote visionaries like to call "vertical information silos" - they contain really useful information, but it's stuck there.

So naturally, contrary people are trying to open these silos up and let information do what it does best, which is to get together with other information and make even more information ("You see Timmy, when two bits love each other very much…"). I'm going to differentiate here between social bookmarking and business bookmarking.

On the social side of things, Joshua Schachter has been doing it the longest and best at http://del.icio.us. Go sign up for an account: then you can add your own bookmarks, categorize them with whatever tag helps you organize them, reach them from anywhere on the net, and then see what other users tagged with the same phrase. It's like Amazon's "people who liked this book also bought…", only for the web. Joshua's even added an open API, so you can program whatever weird and whacky app against it that you desire. Now if only he would stop blowing me away on XBox Live…

Ok, so you have business bookmarks too, and you'd really like to share them with your team, but not with the entire world. Until peterb's wish for private del.icio.us areas is granted (or until some bright company buys the whole thing out from Joshua and starts selling it as a corporate intranet service), we're left with homegrown solutions. I've tried both SharePoint and wikis, so that's what I'll talk about.

SharePoint makes a great structured way to share bookmarks. But first you've got to understand the Zen of SharePoint, which is this: it's just like SQL, but without the agonizing pain. Yup, under the hood beats good ol' SQL Server. That means SharePoint is all about lists. Lists of anything you want, with any categories you want, normalized any way you want. The absence of agonizing relational pain is due to the slick web interface on top, so that you never so much as smell a query. And then you can slice and dice those lists to your heart's content. If you're a control freak, you can even say who gets what access to those lists.

Now replace "lists" with "lists of bookmarks" and you start to understand SharePoint's power. I've got well over 200 bookmarks about Exchange and C# in SharePoint. Put that many bookmarks into a browser hierarchy and you'll end up losing stuff. Plus, when it comes to sharing those bookmarks you'll rapidly find that your idea of the most obvious way to organize a hierarchy is completely alien to your co-workers, so they're even more lost. In SharePoint I can tag those bookmarks with whatever categories we come up with — which version of Exchange, whether C# information is internal or external, the date a blog post was published — and then everyone can construct their own views to see just the information they want, and exactly how they want it.

Of course, you can have too much structure. If all your bookmarks are trapped in tabular straitjackets, it's a lot harder to spot relationships between them and make connections. This is where a wiki beats SharePoint hands down. Wikis are all about emergent connections and information refactoring. Slap those bookmarks down into a simple unnumbered list, indent and rearrange it a little to show some relationships, add comments to the ones you think are important, and then let your team gradually add more structure and content. Of course, you might end up with something that looks more like a story than a list, so it'll look nicest if you use wiki software that lets you make words into arbitrary links whilst hiding the URL, such as David Ornstein's FlexWiki.

What's next? Like Greg Hughes, I'd wish for a great wiki add-in for SharePoint. With SQL under the hood and ASP.NET on top, it's already got all the functionality we need for a wiki, we're just waiting for someone to step up to the plate and write a great solution. Or is it already out there somewhere, and we just haven't heard about it?

To quote Channel 9's cry to Scoble, "Show us your favorites!"

Update: Jacob Carpenter has written an ASP.NET control to show your del.icio.us links.

Use Word 2003's reading layout, save a tree

jonathanh — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 08:13:00 GMT

I've always hated reading documents formatted for paper on-screen. Until we get 200 dpi LCD screens, there aren't enough pixels to make small print-ready fonts legible without a lot of zooming, at which point navigation becomes a pain. And printing out a paper just to read it once, or maybe mark it up with comments that I then have to transcribe back into the online version, always makes me feel slightly dirty.

Thankfully, Word 2003's reading layout means whole forests can sleep better at night. It's "just" another way of viewing your document, but they've done all the little things right – fonts are resized to be legible, margins are widened to make lines easier to scan, and there's no scrolling between screens. Apparently reading layout also turns on ClearType by default. The end result is that I now prefer to read Word documents online rather than printing them out. And I get annoyed with PDF documents, which are stuck with a page size and format that's great for paper but sucks for screens (except a rotated Tablet PC screen).

My only annoyance with reading layout showed up in specification review meetings. When everyone else was talking about page 11 out of 16 in their printed copies, I never knew which screen (out of, say, 30) that mapped to in reading layout. So I started this post thinking that I was going to end it with a Word feature request, for an additional page counter in reading layout that shows the corresponding page numbers from print layout. That turns out not to be necessary: a little aimless experimentation just showed that Word's go-to-page-number function uses the print-layout page numbering scheme, even in reading layout. So now I can hit <Ctrl-G> 11 <return>, and another twig is saved…

Update: Apparently Bill Gates uses it too - and makes twice as many comments when reading documents using reading mode.

Creating your own keyboard shortcuts in Outlook

jonathanh — Sat, 01 May 2004 19:05:00 GMT

Or, remapping keys for fun and profit.

I subscribe to a fair number of email lists, and use Exchange rules to filter them to individual folders. Since I read just a fraction of the new emails that arrive each day, I find myself doing “Mark All as Read” in Outlook 2003 a lot.

Enough to get aggravating, in fact. “Mouse over folder name, right click, mouse to Mark All as Read, left click” gets boring after a while. A little keyboard experimentation showed that a two-key combination is Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-Q (mark as read). But that's still one key too many. Now, here's a quiz - what search terms should you use in Outlook help or Google to find out how to do this? “Outlook keyboard remapping”? “Outlook keyboard shortcuts”? “Outlook mark all as read key”? Fail, fail, fail.

Thankfully, KC Lemson's blog came through - the other one to try for any Outlook question is Marc's Outlook on Productivity. In her post “Outlook 2003 tip o' the day”, KC explains in painful detail how to customize your toolbars to add a new clickable action. The trick here is that you can assign the action an Alt-shortcut key by putting an & at the appropriate place in its name. And the painful detail is because the customization of Office toolbars involves a big cognitive break from the usual modal interface - even though you have a “Customize” window in the foreground, the Office toolbars in the background are still active in a special “drag text or buttons onto me” mode!

So, following KC's instructions, I dragged the “Mark All as Read” action onto my standard toolbar and renamed it as “&Quickmark”. Now Alt-Q will mark all items in a folder as read. Why Q? Two reasons: I want to do all keyboard work with my left hand so that I can keep my right hand on the mouse, and Alt-Q was the first key I tried that didn't make Outlook do something else entirely.

Now, the next question is how to get this into office.microsoft.com…

That's a LOT of hidden data...

jonathanh — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 04:39:00 GMT

Or, how you can use the Office Remove Hidden Data tool to compress your Word documents.

Recently I've been spending a lot of time editing Word documents with other people. This typically requires a final pass to… harmonize… the different format styles that people use. After the latest session of removing visible gunk, I got to wondering whether the new Remove Hidden Data tool could get rid of the physical gunk. A quick experiment with five different Word documents from various sources shows that yes, yes it can:

Document	Before Hidden Data Removal	After Hidden Data Removal	Compression Ratio
Word doc #1	0.24 MB	0.17 MB	1.4 x
Word doc #2	0.39 MB	0.15 MB	2.6 x
Word doc #3	1.17 MB	0.44 MB	2.7 x
Word doc #4	1.37 MB	0.33 MB	4.2 x
Word doc #5	3.00 MB	0.51 MB	5.9 x

Fair warning: the tool happily consumed >10 minutes of CPU time on a 3 GHz Xeon for #5, and it marks the resulting file as read-only. But a compression ratio of up to 6-to-1 is not to be sniffed at!

"The Remove Hidden Data tool: it's not just for security anymore"

Update: There's a new version of the tool available, which promises “substantially increased” performance (via Roberdan)

Font choices, and other religious wars

jonathanh — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 03:32:00 GMT

Scoble's interview with Bill Hill reminded me that font choices are another weapon in the ongoing battle against information overload. Of course, any conversation about fonts is almost as likely to escalate into an all-out religious war as is a conversation about, say, code indentation practices*. So I'll start out with relatively bland points, and then move on to the more controversial stuff. Here goes:

You need ClearType. No, really, you do - unless you're one of the small minority who are too color-sensitive. And you probably need to tune it.
It follows from #1 that you need LCD screens - it's the 21st century, and making little bits of phosphor glow by putting them on the inside of a giant vacuum tube and zapping them with electron beams just doesn't cut it anymore. Use your laptop as a second screen if you have to.
Microsoft's "core fonts for the web" have been designed specifically for readability on computer screens, and you'd be crazy not to try them out first.
If you've made it this far, you need a way to compare fonts easily and quickly at multiple point sizes. I like this page from Jeff Howard.
Sans serif fonts are great for absorbing small amounts of information quickly - so use one for email. As Omar Shahine points out, the mainstream choices are Verdana, Tahoma, and Arial, which are basically three narrowing variants on a theme.
Serif fonts are better for reading large amounts of information, because the serifs help the eye move horizontally along a line. They're probably not a good idea for your typical web page, but try a serif font if you're writing a lot of text. Just don't use Times New Roman on a screen; Georgia should be your default.
Consider using a "personal" font for email, especially if you're in a small team. If Fred uses Verdana and Jim uses Tahoma and I use Trebuchet, it's a lot easier to instantly get context in any long email thread.
11 point text is easiest to read. 10 and 12 point text are ok. Don't use anything else for extended sections of text.
Any modern IDE will let you code in whatever font you like, be it proportional or monospaced. Here the "weight" of characters such as ()<>{} becomes critical. They are often afterthoughts in font design, and can be screwed up in either direction - too heavy and they dominate your identifiers, too light and your structure is hard to parse. As with Peter Golde, I like Verdana.
If you still insist on monospaced for coding (or, even worse, if you're stuck with an IDE that insists on it), at least use a sans serif font. And since Tobias Jung put all that effort into hunting down ProFont, you could give it a go. But please, not at 8 point. It's far better to get a second screen…

*Three-space tab stops. You know it makes sense.

[Update: I've added another post on ClearType]

Using your laptop as a second screen

jonathanh — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 05:13:00 GMT

Advertisers, Wall Street traders, and anyone who's ever fought for a share of the Windows desktop knows that the most important real estate on the planet is the screen you're looking at right now. And like all real estate, while some is good, more is better. We can't all have the quad-screen-from-hell, but a lot of us do have laptops or TabletPCs sitting next to our main display, and this post is about putting those extra LCD screens to better use.

You probably encountered what happens next as soon as you stopped thinking about how neat it was to have two screens on your desk, and started getting into a good work groove. It happens to everyone. You're in the zone, operating in flow, the computer as a seamless extension of your mind, until... you reach for information on the other screen, and nothing happens. Stopped cold, you look down and realize that you're using the wrong keyboard and mouse to get that information. Your concentration's broken, and you find yourself wishing that you could seamlessly move your mouse pointer from this screen to that screen, just like a real multi-headed monitor setup.

Thankfully, Scoble's blog has given pointers to no fewer than four tools that do just that: ShareKMC, Synergy, MaxiVista, and an internal Microsoft tool that I'll call "MSTool"*. What follows is a personal review of these tools - for a different perspective, see Loren's comparisons of ShareKMC vs Synergy, and ShareKMC vs MaxiVista.

ShareKMC: Probably the best known of the tools - use one keyboard and mouse to control two computers, hitting a key to flip focus between screens. ShareKMC emphasizes cut-and-paste functionality, and the latest release is significantly faster than earlier versions.
MSTool: My first love. Same basic approach as ShareKMC, but feels easier to work with because (1) it's even faster, and (2) you just move the mouse cursor off screen to change focus. Unfortunately like any good research tool it's got some rough edges: cut-and-paste only works in one direction, there's no support for extended keyboard and mouse functionality, and once or twice a day it would just wedge solid on me.
Synergy: Downloaded but not yet installed at the office - hey, it's Sunday! From the README and Loren's post it seems similar to the previous two, with the additional bonuses of cross-platform use and support for more than two screens, but some rough edges (e.g. limited cut-and-paste functionality).
MaxiVista: The latest contender takes a fundamentally different approach - rather than letting the two computers run independently, it uses a fake VGA driver so that your laptop becomes in effect just an extra screen for your host PC. The multi-monitor support in Windows XP promptly kicks in, you can drag-and-drop windows between the two screens, and some apps get smarter (e.g. Powerpoint 2003 drives both displays, showing edit mode on the first screen and slideshow mode on the second). Despite having to ship display bits over the wire, it's respectably fast.

Summarizing:

Feature	ShareKMC	Synergy	MSTool	MaxiVista
Switch focus using...	Keyboard	Mouse	Mouse	Mouse
Full cut-and-paste?	Yes	Partial	One-way	Yes
Perceivable lag?	Slight	?	None	Slight
Rough edges?	No	?	Yes	No
Laptop resources available?	Yes	Yes	Yes	No

Right now I'm very happy with MaxiVista. If for some reason I lost my wired connection I'd go back to ShareKMC, and if I got a second TabletPC I'd check out Synergy. As for MSTool, the flakiness and the loss of my mouse's back-button outweighs the extra smoothness, so don't give up on ShareKMC yet Loren!

*This is not its real name, but after the Sideshow affair I'm taking no chances - Sideshow was a widely-used internal tool that was yanked after someone leaked the code. I'll return to it in a future post on "peripheral awareness"

Update: See also Scott Hanselman's review of MaxiVista from last year, and Gizmodo's review after my original post. Oh, and after the demo ran out I bought the full version.

Update^2: MaxiVista v2.0 lets you flip between "laptop as second monitor" and "laptop as second computer". Oh, and performance has gone from "respectably fast" to "can't tell it's not a real screen". Highly recommended.