Currently I'm struggling with single monitors at my new employers.  Web programming is simply a frustrating task when you have to alt+tab been your IDE and your web browser to test changes.

Alt+tab is made far easier with TaskSwitchXP and my AutoHotkey script that allows me to Alt+Tab with my mouse.  You'd be surprised how much different using the mouse to alt+tab makes because you can scroll back and forth between items in the alt+tab list.

Since I don't have dual-screens yet I was looking for a way to better use the 22" widescreen I currently have.  I remembered from long ago about a program that let's you divide your screen into a grid so you can maximise windows into specific areas.  I was hoping it might allow me to maximise an application into a two-third area on the left and another application into a two third area on the right (overlapping each other in the middle third area), giving me a partial view of each screen at any time.  But in my searches I only found Acer VistaGrid which divides your screen into a grid, but with no overlapping it's really only useful if you're using programs that require very little screen space.

But in my searches I found the Microsoft research article, Two Screens Are Better Than One.  It's the first article I've seen that refers to research proving you can work more efficiently with multiple monitors and that it's not just a luxury.

It also suggested that Microsoft is researching how to better use multiple monitors which I found both surprising and confusing.  I've ranted previously that Vista's support for multiple monitors is no different to what 95 had--perhaps with the exception of being able to adjust the relative position of each monitor which was introduced sometime between now and then.

So I was surprised that after 13 years of no changes, Microsoft does actually have people looking at better support.  But confused because one of the research areas is how to maximise a single window across more than one monitor.  UltraMon has given us this ability, at least, since Windows 2000 was the latest and greatest but Microsoft has yet to crack the puzzle themselves.  I really hope these researches aren't being paid too much.

Now, if you've read this far, here's the reason I'm posting.  One of the research areas is how to better display the mouse cursors movement so it isn't as easily lost between screens.  The solution is called High-density Cursor .  It involves drawing additional frames between the cursor frames that appear as a result of your monitors refresh rate.  So it sounds like mouse trails but works much better.  They've created a number of variable that effects how it works, such as scaling the mouse cursor to make it larger as you move it.

It looks to work extremely well in the video, but unfortunately you can't use it yet.  You can, however, test the effect in a flash demo.  It doesn't seem like a complicated system so I'm really hoping Microsoft releases this soon.