More Mac 101, tips for the Mac beginner in you. Lucky dual-monitor users, rejoice -- with that second display on your desk, you're bound to be the productivity envy of the entire office. Just one little problem, though: sometimes your Mac has trouble recognizing that extra real estate, and rebooting every time your resolutions get munged is beginning to get old.

Relax, and check out your mini-menu for monitors over there in the menu bar. See "Detect Displays?" That's your buddy, right there -- it will tell your Mac to recheck the connected monitors and adjust resolutions as needed. Note the model number of the external display shown; if everything's connected as it should be, your Mac should autosense the type and capabilities of the display without any intervention.

For an even quicker trigger on display detection, try Cmd-F2 (brightness up) on your built-in laptop keyboard. Cmd-F1 will toggle display mirroring, also handy in a pinch.

There are several ways other ways to get external displays to behave; the oldest, for laptop users, is to sleep the machine and wake it back up -- this usually triggers a display detection when all else fails. There's also a Detect Displays button in the Displays preference pane.

Also, to answer a reader question from the comments: it's easy to specify which display acts as the primary monitor in a dual-display setup: just drag the teensy proxy menubar from one display to the other, and your menus, drive icons etc. will follow.

Mac Mini users have been waiting a long time for a true dual-monitor solution. Sure there are a bunch of work-arounds out there that let you run more than one screen at a time but a real multi-screen solution hasn't yet been available as far as I know. (Honestly, I haven't been looking all that hard--so if there's one I missed let me know in the comments.)

Display Link has finally decided to let the mini come to the multi-display party. TUAW reader Nick tipped us off to these new beta drivers for Mac OS X.

The DisplayLink hardware supports up to 4 USB-based monitors. You're limited to Intel Macs but minis and MacBook Airs are supported. The beta does not support OpenGL acceleration so Keynote and iPhoto slide shows will not properly function.

From what I could tell from the site, Display Link seems to be sold with third party branding. The Kensington USB docking station (model 33415) for $140 is apparently the product in question.

Imagine the scary, Sarkian voice of David Warner intoning "You will be subject to immediate de-resolution" and you'll know how a cluster of Leopard-using laptop owners (including yours truly) are feeling after getting bitten by a problem in the Leopard Graphics Update. You can see the rundown over at MacFixIt; the symptom is that after a restart or crash, the previously-happy external display is registered by the OS as a replica of the internal LCD, limited to the same 1400x900 resolution (in the case of the MacBook Pro 15" I'm using) as the built-in display. Custom calibrations and other display-specific tweaks are also nowhere to be found.

The usual first steps to troubleshooting display issues -- unplug/replug, "Detect Displays," sleep and wake the laptop -- were fruitless. For me, even the heroic measures of a PRAM reset and deleting the com.apple.displays plist from the ByHost preferences folder didn't make a dent. Switching from a DVI to VGA cable left me with only a secondary screen on the laptop, sans menu bar, and the usual Cmd-F2 to trigger a display detect did nothing at all. How aggravating!

Still, one of the reasons I heart MacFixIt is because there's usually an offbeat (not to say wacky) workaround in the mix when a problem comes on the radar. In this case, the suggestion that made me go "Wha? Nah!" was to power on the laptop, immediately close the lid (with external display still attached) and wait for the machine to boot completely. I tried it; lo and behold, the external display is now recognized correctly, and when the machine is slept and awakened or "Detect Displays" is triggered, everything behaves as expected.

Sometimes, when the weirdest possible fix is the one that works, you just have to put the laptop down and slowly back away.

For today's Mac 101 I thought I'd draw your attention to a feature of the Displays tab of the System Preferences that only appears on external monitors: Rotate. If you plug in an external monitor to your Mac you should see that you have the option to rotate the display by 90 degree increments (clockwise). Now why would you want to do this? Well, if like me you have an external widescreen display, sometimes it's actually more handy to use it vertically instead of horizontally. I do this because I work entirely on the main (24") display and use the external (20") for showing my email, iTunes, etc. On my desk, I feel like this is a more efficient allocation of pixels. You can see a picture of my setup after the jump.

Still wondering what was lurking under that mysteriously wrapped object, wonder no more. Over at Flickr, user Saminman has posted an entire set of snapshots showing off the new iPhone window displays. This appears to be a slightly different installation from the AT&T display. For one thing, it seems to be run off a Mac and not a Dell.

According to MacDailyNews who relays information gleaned from ThinkSecret, the 17-inch iMac will soon be no more. Let's have a quick moment of silence to say goodbye.

Right then. Enough of the moment.

Industry insiders, those anonymous sources of all the most fabulous and occasionally reliable Apple news, suggest that starting at the end of June a refreshed iMac line will consist of 20- and 24-inch models. As display prices continue to drop, the cost difference between a 17-inch and 20-inch iMac has apparently shrunk as well, making this jump in screen size possible. More screen, same $$s. Excellent.

One could allow Fred Greaves and Dave Gatley some latitude for extreme frustration. Both Mac-toting photographers found themselves, along with other MacBook and MacBook Pro owners, dealing with 'sparkly' and 'grainy' color on their laptop screens; as color-sensitive professionals, this rankled. Being told by Apple support that they were hypersensitive and they should get over themselves? Not good. Seeing discussion threads on the issue squelched on Apple's support boards? Infuriating. So, the two men decided to avail themselves of the last tech support refuge of the American consumer: the class-action lawsuit.

At the heart of Greaves and Gatley's action is the belief that Apple deceptively promoted its laptop screens as having superior color performance, when in fact the displays are only capable of displaying 18-bit color (6 bit * 3 channels, about 262,000 colors; contrast with 24-bit color, 8 bits per channel for 16.7 million colors). While almost all laptop panels are 6-bit models, and other laptop manufacturers use similar dithering methods (Frame Rate Control) to achieve the perceived wider gamut of millions of colors, this seems fishy to G&G. Additionally, the subjective experience of some MBP owners indicates that the banding/sparkling issues are nonexistent when the machines are booted into Windows; hence, a software or firmware issue on the Mac side would seem to be degrading the display/adapter performance.

I'm no stranger to the hardware problem that's oddly OS-specific, and I sympathize with those who expected Pro color on Pro laptops. The 6-bit vs. 8-bit issue aside -- it's industry-standard, and some Apple tech notes even acknowledge the distinction -- and as frustrating as the color conundrum must be for those affected, I can't imagine that this lawsuit is going to allow anyone to see green (aside from plaintiff's attorneys, that is).

[via Ars Technica]

Mac Daily News reports that AT&T Mobility (the former Cingular) stores across the US will soon be getting their enormous iPhone displays. They link to this Boy Genius Report, which relies on information from industry insiders and says the displays will require their own power supplies and network cables in order to show off the iPhone. The display itself should be 3 feet wide and 7 feet tall, which does not sound particularly "enormous" to me in terms of retail merchandising.

I just recently plunked down some of my sweet, sweet blogging money for a 24 inch Dell monitor (check out my setup) which I am loving. Setting it up with my MacBook running OS X 10.4.8 was very easy (as long as you have one of these). There are a few things that did get me, which I thought I would point out for you readers out there.

Above you see the Arrangement section from the Display preference pane in System Preferences (note that each display will popup its own Display pref pane, but only the main display will have the Arrangement option). This is where you can do a few things:

1. Arrange the displays by dragging the boxes that represent them around
2. Move the Dock and the menu bar to whichever monitor you want to use as you main monitor (as you can see I'm using the 24 incher as my main display)
3. Mirror the output on each display

This is where you should first go when you have multiple monitors, however, the fun doesn't end there.

Don't waste your money on a new Mac if you are looking to upgrade, just get yourself a huge monitor. That's Paul Boutin's theory, and I agree. Computers now a days are pretty much powerful enough to handle whatever the regular user throws at them (I'm not talking about pro users like video editors and the like, they have known the benefits of a large monitor for a long time). You'll get the most bang for your buck with a new, crisp, big monitor.

My new 23 inch Cinema Display at work has really increased my productivity. I have a lot more room for everything I need.

Give it some thought when you're next in the market for a new computer.

A number of observant TUAW readers have also noticed that Apple has (quietly) slashes Cinema display prices with the introduction of the Mac Pro. There were rumors of Cinema updates before WWDC, but it seems that Apple simply wanted to give our pocketbooks a break with the $500 increase in the Mac Pro's price. Cinema display prices now look a little something like this:

• 20-inch: $699
• 23-inch: $999
• 30-inch: $1999 (what a drop!)
  

Unfortunately, I can't even get into the EDU store so I'm not sure how much better prices are for students yet. Ultimately, these prices should look a bit more appealing amidst criticism of what some say are slightly overpriced LCDs.

Sure, the G5 Power Mac on the floor is cool, as is the iPod and the Xbox 360. But check out the four image-spanning displays! Is that TUAW on the Cinema display, with my Munsters post front and center? Seriously, could you run Photoshop on this setup or what?

"Untitled" posted by scorpioca77.

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