This article originally appeared on the Affinity Consulting December 2012 newsletter on legal technology.

Mac-based attorneys are less familiar with using multiple monitors to increase productivity because Apple provides no native solution to make multi-monitor workspaces a reality. There are two reasons for this situation. First, Apple’s preferred solution is its 27” Thunderbolt display. The upside of the Thunderbolt display is plenty of real estate, a minimum number of cables on your desk, and the functionality of a docking station built into the monitor. The downside is its $1,000 price. The second barrier to creating a multi-monitor Mac environment, is that no one makes docking station solutions for the Mac.¹

Between the Apple-promoted $1,000 solution and the lack of docking stations, no obvious, inexpensive Mac multi-monitor solution presents itself. But it does exist. I am typing this article on a MacBook Pro Retina² laptop connected to two 23” Dell P2312H monitors that cost about $190 each. It works seamlessly. The Mac sees one giant screen across which I can spread all my app windows.³ The tool that makes this inexpensive expanse possible is the Matrox DualHead2Go Digital ME, which costs about $170.⁴ Doing the math⁵, gives you two screens at 55% of the cost of a Thunderbolt display.

Not only do you save a significant chunk of change, but these particular Dell displays offer features absent from the Thunderbolt display. The Dells rotate vertically, letting you see an entire 8.5×11 page on the screen at once. The Dells are also matte displays, meaning that you avoid the reflective glass of the Thunderbolt display. The only downside of this method is many more wires than a Thunderbolt display, the loss of docking-station-like features such as built-in ethernet and Firewire/USB ports, and stereo speakers. If you are willing to add even more wires to your desktop, you can compensate for these missing features.

Using Multi-Monitors in Your Mac Legal Environment

Once you have acquired and physically setup the monitors and the DualHead2Go, Matrox provides a CD for you to install the DualHead2Go drivers.⁶ Having completed the install, you can now focus on utilizing this new space.

The first program I recommend is BetterSnap Tool, $2 from the Mac App Store.⁷ It lets you define areas of the screen and, when you drag a window to the area, the window automatically resizes to a size and location that you predefined. I use this, for example, to run Windows 8 on one monitor. When I drag that VMware Fusion window to specific location, it automatically refills to an entire physical screen. With two screens, that means I can literally have Windows 8 on one 23” screen and Mountain Lion the other screen. For those working in predominantly Windows environments, or who need access to Windows-specific apps, this an excellent compromise. If you configure VMware Fusion or Parallels correctly, then you can easily share files between the Mac and Windows environment; either through shared folders or just dragging and dropping from one window to the next.

In addition to running two operating systems on two screens, you can do everything any two-screened Windows machine could do. Have Westlaw or Lexis open on one screen and Microsoft Word open on the other. Have your word processor⁸ in one window and a mind-mapper or outline tool in the other. If you’re preparing a CLE or other presentation in Keynote or PowerPoint, devote one screen to the visual appearance and the second to the myriad toolbars those apps open. Or, for example, the way I wrote this article: I had Byword open on one screen and Marked open on the second. As I made edits to the Byword document, each Cmd+S (File:Save) in Byword produced a formatted draft image of the article in Marked.⁹ The goal is to think of dual screens as a canvas on which you can spread out your project. Rather than constantly pressing Command+Tab, just turn your head 5°.

When you’re ready to head home for the day, simply unplug the DualHead2Go device, meaning you remove a USB cable and the Display Port/Thunderbolt cable from the Mac. Reopen your MacBook at home, the windows adjust to the smaller screen, and you start working where you left off.

For $550, dual monitors on a Mac are among the best productivity improvements that a Mac-using attorney can make. If you are skeptical of the value of dual monitors, just make a note of every time you Cmd+Tab to refresh your memory of something in another app window. You will see the value of more screen real estate in no time.

January 10, 2013

1. A third-party company, BookEndz, is working to make its docking solutions compatible with modern Macs. ↩
2. I happen to be using a Retina model, but the solution works with any shipping Mac laptop. ↩
3. If you are curious, the combined resolution is 3840×1080. ↩
4. The DualHead2Go ME connects to your Macs DisplayPort or Thunderbolt port, and to one USB port. The monitors then connect to the other end of the DualHead2Go by DVI-D connections, which the Dell P2312H supports. It even includes DVI-D cables in the box. ↩
5. Meaning ([latex]190*2)+[/latex]170=$550. ↩
6. If you are running a Mac with Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), then skip the CD and download the latest drivers at Matrox’s website. ↩
7. The first and worst annoyance that I discovered with such a large screen is that Preview always opens across both screens, meaning that I see about two lines of text, each 6” tall. BetterSnap Tool makes it easy to immediately drag the window to a “hotspot” so that it automatically resizes to something useful. ↩
8. It doesn’t matter what word processor you use. Whether it’s Word, Pages, Nisus Writer, or a text-focused editor like Scrivener, the Mac handles the dual screens separate and apart from individual applications. ↩
9. The reason for the live preview is that, unlike the page-centric product of most attorneys, this article was written in Markdown, a writer-friendly intermediary of HTML. Marked translates the HMTL-marked-up text into a formatted page that could be posted straight to the web. ↩