The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Dual Monitor display: popup dialogs question

Dual Monitor display: popup dialogs question

Hi,

After folks on JoS raved about Dual Monitors, I broke down and got a Radeon 7000. Works pretty slick.

QUESTION:
If I have an app running on the secondary screen and it pops up some message box type dialog, the dialog shows up on the PRIMARY screen. Very annoying. Any thoughts?

Is this just the way it works, or are there work arounds?

The real Entrepreneur
Friday, January 23, 2004

Hydravision (comes with the ATI drivers) solves this problem. But I think hydravision is a crappy prgram.

Ultramon is a great program for managing multiple monitors, I don't know how it handles the popup dialog issue (if it does anything at all).

Almost Anonymous
Friday, January 23, 2004

What OS? The later versions of Windows do a better job of imposing sanity on dual monitor setups.

There are, unfortunately, still a lot of applications out there that have written code for window-positioning that assumes one monitor. Specifically they query the screen size and then move their window until they're sure it's on screen. In dual monitor systems, the old screen size functions return the size of the first screen, so the window moves -- from the helpful place where Windows put it -- to the first monitor. (CityDesk has this bug until I got a dual monitor system!) Hopefully when more developers have dual monitors these remaining bugs will be worked out...

Joel Spolsky
Friday, January 23, 2004

visual studio is helpful. it sticks dialogs in the center of the screen (half on one monitor, half on the other)

mb
Friday, January 23, 2004

Another interesting "side effect" arises when you select the screen on the right as the primary monitor with applications that try to create an off-screen window (for handling Windows messages, I suppose)... Fortunately it doesn't happen too often.

Big B
Friday, January 23, 2004

Sadly you've not got what I call "true" dual monitor.
The matrox cards get this right and appear to XP as two cards (rather than one wide card) in this case you don't need hydra vision and popups/dialogs all work correctly. Actually a few programs that draw their own combo box drop down on screen 0 directly don't but I think that was only office97.

Peter Ibbotson
Saturday, January 24, 2004

Almost Anonymous,

Thanks. I found the setting in Hydravision that seems to have fixed the problem, at least with my 32 bit progams.

The real Entrepreneur
Saturday, January 24, 2004

trE: care to share your fix?

Gavin van Lelyveld
Monday, January 26, 2004