Multimon: Software My Chiropractor Made Me Buy

Well, he didn't exactly do that. The big frown and look of disapproval at the photo I had been instructed to take of my work area told me almost all I needed to know about what he was about to say.

I work from home quite often and although I've never had a problem with how my desk is arranged etc, it came up when I needed to visit a chiropractor for the first time in my life. He wasn't too impressed with where my laptop was on my desk and my second screen that I used for my Fusion VM, Twitter and my less used apps. After he explained all of the reasons why, he then proceeded to suggest what I needed to do to remedy the problems that he perceived. I've taken his advice and interpreted it in the way that suits my methods of working best.

Instead of raising the height of my laptop by about 12 inches, I've demoted it to “second screen” status and  rarely run anything on it whilst it's on my desk. My second screen has been promoted to primary display and its height and position are where my chiropractor would want them. I've even replaced it with something bigger and better so that I have oodles of desktop space.

Great. The problem now is that OSX (Mountain Lion) is quite frankly pants at handling multiple displays and I don't want to spend ages rearranging desktops and application windows every time I unhook my laptop to go to the office or a client site. Supposedly the next version of OSX (called Mavericks presumably because they ran out of big cat names) fixes a lot of these problems but I think I'll go mad waiting for it.

In the meantime, Multimon does exactly what I want it to do. It remembers settings for different monitors, duplicates application menus on different displays, can resize and reposition app windows via shortcut keys and restores my app window positions when I reconnect and disconnect the external display.

I suspect he won't let me deduct the cost of the software from the fee for the next appointment I have though…