“Abyssoft Teleport lets me move my cursor, keyboard, and mouse across my monitors”

Christopher Judd, IT consultant, has an impressive range of displays, and an even more impressive screensaver. “I wanted a screensaver that mimicked The Matrix control consoles, and the best one I could find that did multiple monitors was MatrixSaver 2.0 (bit.ly/1l1Bb2P). The main unit driving these four large LED screens is a 2010 Mac Pro under the desk. It’s beefed up with an internal SSD for the system and apps, an external SATA 6TB RAID and 32GB of RAM. This lets me run a number of developer environments and some virtual machines, including several Linux distros and Windows 7 and 8.1.”

Why so many screens? “I need to spread out and not shuffle windows too much,” he says. “As a server, database and email administrator, I can have console sessions and realtime logs scrolling to keep an eye on things. I can have lots of browsers open for research, and I keep one of the vertical screens full of various IRC and chat programs.”

He can integrate his notebooks into this system too. “I use an app called Abyssoft Teleport that lets me move the cursor to the edge of the monitor, and (holding a hot key) move the cursor, mouse, keyboard and clipboard to the laptop. It’s slick! It means I don’t have to reach over and use the notebook’s keyboards and trackpads.”

He has a wide range of tablets, but not all of them are Apple. “I have one from Apple, Windows and Android,” he explains. “It’s so I can develop and test applications with knowledge of the user experience on each platform, and know the nuances of syncing data between them all for user support. It’s hard to pick an overall favourite since they each offer cool features, but I’m on the iPhone 5 the most.”

Chris has a USB SuperDrive, but it’s rarely used, buried under a tangle of wires. “It’s there for the odd CD or DVD, but these days I find myself using tiny portable HDDs, SSDs or Flash Drives. It’s time to move on from optical storage. With the advent of the portable flash drives (and their now-huge capacities) and streaming media, optical discs are becoming less viable. Blu Ray is the only optical media of substance now, but that too will fade as capacity and speed increases on the other devices.”